Samuel was born to school teachers Samuel Proctor & Earlee Jacko Massie of North Little Rock (Pulaski County).He had one younger brother.He quickly advance in high school and graduated second in his class from Dunbar High School in Little Rock by age thirteen.Early on,he wanted to find a cure for his daddy's asthma.
After working for a year at Horton's Grocery across the street from his home in North Little Rock,Samuel had saved enough to afford tuition of $ 15 per semester at Dunbar Junior College.A year later in 1934,the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) turned down his application for admission because he was African-American.He enrolled at Arkansas AM&N (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff);earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry with a minor in mathematics in 1937;and with the aid of a federal National Youth Admission scholarship,finished a master's degree in chemistry in 1940 at Fisk University in Nashville,Tennessee.He taught a year at Arkansas AM&N before gaining admission to a doctorate program in chemistry at Iowa State University.
Racial discrimination did not make Samuel's life any easier in Iowa.The closet housing available for African Americans was was three miles from campus,reqiring him to to hitchhike to classes.He noted that he was assigned to a separate lab space "next to the rats in the basement" until he proved himself.
He almost did not get to complete his doctoral program.Samuel Massie returned to Arkansas in 1943 to attend his daddy's funeral and to renew his draft deferment.According to his autobiography,a member of the draft board in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) decided that he had too much education for an African American and would be drafted.Samuel quickly contacted Dr.Gilman,who assigned him to his research team working on the atomic bomb.In 1946,Samuel received his PhD in organic chemistry at Iowa State and took a teaching position at Fisk,having published seven research papers with Dr.Gilman in the journal of the American Chemical Society.
In 1947,Samuel married Gloria Bell Thompkins,whom he met at Fisk.Gloria became a psychology professor,and the couple had three sons.Samuel taught at Langston University in Langston,Oklahoma,from 1947-1953 and again at Fisk from 1953-1960.In 1954,he published "The Chemistry of Phenothiazine," an article in Chemical Review that led to a breakthrough by French chemists in development of the antipsychotic drug Thorazine.Work followed at the National Science Foundation and Howard University in Washington DC in the early 1960s.The Manufacturing Chemists Association recognized Samuel in 1961 as one of the six chemistry teachers in America.He served as president of North Carolina College in Durham for four years prior to his appointment in 1966 as professor of chemistry in the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis,Maryland,where he was the first African American faculty member.In 1970,UA awarded Samuel an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.
He returned from the Naval Academy in 1993.During his tenure there,he served on the academy's equal opportunity committee and helped establish an African American studies program.Samuel portrait was hung in the National Academy of Sciences Gallery in 1955.In 1994,the U.S. Department of Energy created the Dr.Samuel P.Massie Chair of Excellence, a $ 14.7 million grant to nine historically African American colleges and one for Hispanic students to futher environmental research.
Samuel died in Laurel Maryland, and buried at St.Anne's Cemetery in Annapolis,Maryland.
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