August Meier, 79; Expert on History of African Americans

August Meier, 79, a scholar of African American history who once debated Malcolm X, died March 19 at his home in New York City. The cause was a progressive neurological disorder.

Meier’s first and most important book was “Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915,” published in 1963, which explored the ideas of such major post-Civil War leaders as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. The book was credited for its solid documentation of divisions among black Americans on integration and segregation.

A professor of history at Kent State University from 1967 to 1993, Meier wrote or edited more than a dozen books during his career, including “Black Detroit and the Rise of the U.A.W.” in 1979, which won the Philip Taft Labor History Award. He also wrote the 1970 book “Black Nationalism in America,” which critics found so thorough and fair that they assumed Meier was black, but he was not.

Born in Newark, N.J., he attended Oberlin College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1945. He earned a master’s and doctorate from Columbia University before embarking on a teaching career at several black colleges, including Morgan State College in Baltimore, where he debated integration with Malcolm X in the early 1960s.