August Meier
August Meier died on 19 March 2003 in New York City. At the time of his death he was under the loving care of his niece Diane Meier, a geriatric physician, and his brother Paul Meier and his wife Louise.
August Meier, "Augie" as he was known by friends and colleagues, was born 30 April 1923. Augie graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in history, and did graduate study at Columbia University where he received an M.A. and the Ph.D. His Master's thesis on "The Emergence of Negro Nationalism" and his doctoral dissertation on racial ideologies during the age of Booker T. Washington were early indications of the depth of his interest in understanding the intellectual world of African American leaders and thinkers since Reconstruction.
Augie's career path was unusual even for the small number of white scholars who had a serious interest in African American history. Augie's first teaching position was at Tougaloo College near Jackson, Mississippi (1945-1949) and he later taught at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee (1952-1957) and at Morgan State University in Baltimore (1957-1963). He taught at Roosevelt University in Chicago (1963-1966) before taking the position at Kent State University that he held for the remainder of his academic career. After retirement, Augie lived in Kent until the death of his partner and collaborator Elliott Rudwick when he moved back to the New York City area.
 Despite his legendary fears and anxieties, Augie was quite courageous when it came to confronting racial barriers. At Tougaloo, he was willing to accompany his students on trips to places that surely posed a risk in Jim Crow Mississippi. While at Morgan State he served as faculty advisor to the Non-Violent Action Group and was arrested in several civil rights campaigns. Augie and Howard Zinn lobbied to end the practice of the Southern Historical Association of holding meetings at segregated hotels. He worked with Bayard Rustin and Tom Kahn in the Washington office of the 1963 March on Washington. In 1962, Augie debated Malcolm X when none of the black faculty at Morgan were willing to take on that task. For years Augie tried, unsuccessfully, to convince me that he won the debate. Only when he came to Roosevelt did he break with his activist past and devote himself full time to scholarship.
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of August Meier to the revival of interest in African American History during the 1960s. Augie and Elliott both were aware that the increasing general enthusiasm for the study of Black people was due more to the achievements of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements than to an epiphany on the part of the historical profession, and he was concerned that such a genesis might not be a sufficient enough foundation. In addition to his own scholarship, Augie set himself the tasks of trying to get back into print as much of the classic work of older Black scholars and to help produce a new generation of scholars who took the study of Black people seriously.
Augie came to the attention of the historical profession with the publication in 1963 of Negro Thought in America: Racial Ideologies in the Age Of Booker T. Washington, 1880-1915 (University of Michigan Press) which opened up the discussion of the history of black ideologies in exciting new ways.
Augie, beginning his collaboration with Elliott Rudwick, produced two pioneering anthologies that made available documents that explicated the themes and trends that he outlined in Negro Thought in America: Negro Protest Thought and Black Nationalism in America. Continuing an interest in both protest movements and ideologies Meier and Rudwick published CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford University Press, 1973) still one of the best studies of its kind. They then turned their attention to the study of the NAACP. One detour from that larger work resulted in the publication of Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (Oxford University Press,1979). Another productive detour resulted in Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (University of Illinois Press, 1986).
Augie and Elliott reconfigured their research to focus on the question of the NAACP's involvement in the struggle for economic opportunity and against racial discrimination in the labor movement. This was the work that Augie and Elliott were collaborating on until Elliott's death. I accepted Augie's offer to help him continue with it until it became clear that he was no longer able to sustain the energy and focus necessary. The last years of his scholarly life were devoted to developing a draft of this larger work, and publishing several articles and brief projects which could be accomplished when Augie had those unfortunately rare periods of tremendous energy and lucidity.
Beginning in the late 1960s, with the support of Robert Zenowich at Atheneum Publishers and later Richard Wentworth at the University of Illinois Press, Augie edited two series: Studies in American Negro Life and Blacks in the New World. Augie was interdisciplinary by instinct and training, and attuned to the benefits of the comparative perspective, so that both projects contained works--reprints and originals that addressed questions of literature and culture, as well as the experiences of blacks in the West Indies, Latin America and Africa. Augie prodded University Publications of America into launching its Black Studies Resource Series of microfilm manuscript sources which helped to make major collections available to scholars across the country. Younger scholars have little idea that the publishing opportunities so readily available to them are of an extremely recent vintage or of Augie's role in helping to bring about that circumstance.
Augie could be a difficult and demanding teacher, mentor and friend. But the proof of his impact can be seen in the quality of the scholars who benefited from interactions with him. At every step of the way Augie found and nurtured students such as Arvah Strickland at Tougaloo; David Levering Lewis, Preston King, and Niara Sudakarsa at Fisk, Darlene Clark Hine and Christopher Reed at Roosevelt University and at Kent State University. Stephen Fox's study of Monroe Trotter, published in the Atheneum series, began as an undergraduate honors thesis. Joe W. Trotter, a leading historian of Black workers, published two books in the Blacks in the New World series. John Dittmer hung in with Augie for a number of years resulting in his masterful Local People: the Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Augie Meier could be cantankerous, blunt to the point of rudeness, oblivious to the world around him, sometimes forgetting the names and faces of persons that he had known for years. Underneath all that was a human being who was generous to a fault, who would spend years nurturing a young scholar through numerous drafts and rewrites, complain about time but spend hours reminiscing about life on Black college campuses. A true son of the Enlightenment, Augie had no religious beliefs and spoke only of "the profession" in reverent tones. The field of African American history, the historical profession, and our world are better for his having passed this way.
John Bracey
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
A memorial service for August Meier will be held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City on 1 June, from 2:00-4:00 P.M. For directions to the Schomberg Center, visit <http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html>.
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