April 10, 2005

Samuel Massie died in Laurel, Maryland. Massie was born in North Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1919. Massie overcame racial barriers to become one of America’s greatest chemists in research and teaching. As a doctoral candidate during World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project with Henry Gilman at Iowa State University in the development of uranium isotopes for the atomic bomb. In 1966, the U.S. Naval Academy appointed him as its first black faculty member. Chemical and Engineering News in 1998 named him one of the top seventy-five chemists of all time. He is buried at St. Anne’s Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.