In Memoriam: Samuel L. Myers (1919–2021)

Abstract

Samuel Myers was an honors graduate of Frederick Douglas High School, once known as the Colored High and Training School, in Baltimore, Maryland. The school was the alma mater of at least two other distinguished African American economists – John Henry Dean (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1938) and Phyllis Wallace (Ph.D. Yale University 1948). The principal at the time, Dr. Mason Hawkins, had studied economics at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Myers matriculated at Morgan College (later known as Morgan State University) in 1936, intending to major in chemistry. However, during his freshman year at Morgan, Myers joined his father on a semester-long voyage to Calcutta, working as a mess boy on a steamer ship. Struck by the abject poverty he observed among the Dalits of Calcutta, he eventually decided to devote his life to creating better public policies to eradicate economic inequalities. Since Morgan did not have an economics department then, Myers majored instead in social science. His passion for economic analysis, though, propelled him to apply to the graduate program in economics at Boston University, where many other Morgan graduates and faculty had trained. At Boston University, Myers studied under the economics department chair, Charles Phillips Huse, a 1907 graduate of Harvard’s Ph.D. program in economics and a specialist in consumer cooperatives. His master’s thesis, Consumer’s Cooperation: A Plan for the Negro (Myers, 1942), argued for the need for African Americans to embrace a cooperative system in opposition to market capitalism that