Dr. Samuel Milton Nabrit was an academic pioneer, the first Morehouse College graduate to earn a doctorate and the first black to receive a Ph.D. from Brown University, where he became the university’s first black trustee.
He was the son of a Baptist preacher who taught at Walker Baptist Institute in Augusta, Ga. On his way to becoming valedictorian of his graduating class in 1921, Dr. Nabrit took classes in Greek, Latin and physics from his father. All eight of the Nabrit children went to college, and James M. Nabrit, one of Dr. Nabrit’s brothers, was president of Howard University.
In 1925 Dr. Nabrit graduated from Morehouse with a bachelor’s degree in science and in 1928 he received a master’s degree from Brown. He earned his doctorate in biology there in 1932. He began teaching at Morehouse immediately after graduation and later taught at Atlanta University, where he was also dean of the graduate school of arts and sciences.
Throughout his academic career, he was an accomplished marine biologist. He studied the regeneration of the tail fins of fish at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and in 1948 he became the second black scientist to earn membership in the Marine Biological Laboratory Corporation, an organization established in 1888 for scientists who worked in the laboratory’s educational or research programs.
At the peak of his scientific career, Dr. Nabrit became head of Texas Southern, a historically black university. There, he quietly supported the students’ push for equality while negotiating with the city’s leaders, including the mayor and police chief, to help preclude the violent reactions to student sit-ins that had occurred in other Southern cities.
Dr. Nabrit’s involvement in the desegregation movement was chronicled in a 1998 documentary film, ”The Strange Demise of Jim Crow: How Houston Desegregated its Public Accommodations, 1959-1963,” which was produced by Dr. Thomas Cole of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Dr. Nabrit to the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission), where he was the first black member. He left that post in 1967 to become executive director of the Southern Fellowship Fund, which he founded to foster opportunities for black students to earn doctorates.
Dr. Nabrit was appointed to the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation in 1956 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and was special ambassador to Niger under President John F. Kennedy.