President of Bowie State an advocate for learning

SAMUEL L. MYERS SR. 1919-2021

Samuel L. Myers Sr., a Harvard-educated economist and leader in Black higher education who presided over momentous change at Bowie State College in the 1960s, died Jan. 8 at his home in Mitchellville, Md. He was 101 and was living at a residential community for seniors.

He died after declining hospital treatment for an inability to swallow, said a son, Samuel L. Myers Jr.

Now called Bowie State university, the historically Black institution in Maryland’s Prince George’s County was founded after the Civil War.

Myers, who grew up in segregated Baltimore schools, was one of the first Blacks to obtain an economics doctorate from Harvard, and served in the 1950s and 1960s as a professor and administrator at historically Black Morgan State College in Baltimore and then as a State department economics officer.

He arrived at Bowie State in July 1967, at a political inflection point for the college amid the civil rights movement and found the previous Bowie State president had been stingy in requests for state appropriations, he told the New york Times. He added that he had taken a $5,000 pay cut from his government job to serve as college president for $19,000 a year, but saw “exciting opportunities to develop human beings.”

during his decade-long tenure, Myers oversaw a $47 million campus building and improvement program, curriculum revisions, faculty credential upgrades and saw student enrolment increase.

After stepping down in 1977, Myers became an advocate for educational improvement for minorities. For 18 years he was president of the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education. He was also a founder, board chairman and senior adviser to Minority Access, a non-profit that works to improve diversity in education, research and health care.

Samuel Lloyd Myers was born in Baltimore on April 18, 1919, to Jamaican parents. A flu pandemic — which killed 50 million worldwide — was raging.

His father worked for a shipping line, and Myers got a job as a ‘cabin boy’ on a ship to Kolkata, his family said. In India, he saw extreme poverty and the physical and mental scars of leprosy, motivating him to work to help others, he later said.

Myers graduated from Morgan State in 1940 and received a master’s degree in economics from Boston university in 1942. He served in the Army in the Pacific during the Second World War, then completed his doctorate from Harvard in 1949.

Myers returned to Morgan State as a teacher before joining the State department in 1963 as a specialist in Latin American trade.

His wife of 64 years, Marion rieras Myers, died in 2006. He is survived by a son, a daughter, two granddaughters and two great-grandsons.