Samuel R. Pierce, Jr.

Lawyer and politician

• Born: September 8, 1922
• Birthplace: Glen Cove, New York
• Died: October 31, 2000
• Place of death: Washington, D. C.

After a brilliant legal career in New York, where the legal profession was dominated by whites, Pierce served eight years as the secretary of housing and urban development. His tenure was marked by scandalous revelations of mismanagement of public monies.

Early Life

Samuel Riley Pierce, Jr., was born on September 8, 1922, into a comfortable middle-class home in upscale Glen Cove on the north shore of New York’s Long Island. Pierce thrived in the classroom and on the football field, where he excelled as a halfback. He earned the rank of Eagle Scout at a time when less than 10 percent of Eagle Scouts nationwide were African American.

Pierce accepted a football scholarship to Cornell University. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa honor society and the Sphinx honor society, the university’s most prestigious honors fraternity. He also distinguished himself on the football field—and not merely as a running back. When Pierce took the field in the Cornell-Navy game at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore on October 18, 1941, he became the first African American to play against Navy; the institution had previously forbidden black athletes on opposing teams from playing at Navy home games. Pierce’s appearance on the field also broke Baltimore’s unofficial segregation of athletic competitions.

After leaving Cornell to serve two years in the Army during World War II (in a criminal investigation unit), Pierce returned to Ithaca and completed his undergraduate degree with honors in 1947. He went on to receive his law degree there in 1949. Pierce then moved to New York City, where he earned a master of laws degree in taxation law in 1952 from New York University.

Life’s Work

From 1953 to 1955, Pierce served as assistant United States attorney in the southern district of New York. A liberal Republican at a time when most African Americans were New Deal Democrats, Pierce was appointed assistant undersecretary of labor in President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and served for two years (1955-1956). When he returned to New York, Governor Nelson Rockefeller appointed him to a judgeship. Pierce, who had no gift for campaigning, later lost in his bid to retain the seat in a borough that was heavily Democratic. He returned to law.

In 1961, Pierce joined the law firm of Battle, Fowler, Stokes & Kheel at the urging of Rockefeller after other Manhattan law firms declined to offer Pierce a position because of his race. That same year, in the landmark Supreme Court case The New York Times v. Sullivan, Pierce participated in the successful defense of the newspaper, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights activists against libel changes filed by Alabama public officials. The case concerned an advertisement the newspaper had run soliciting contributions for the defense of King in an upcoming trial.

When moderate Republican Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, Pierce returned to Washington as general counsel for the Treasury Department. He effectively headed a staff of nearly one thousand lawyers. In 1973, Pierce returned to his Manhattan law firm and became the first African American to be named full partner. He frequently was mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee. In 1981, however, Pierce reluctantly accepted an appointment from President-elect Ronald Reagan to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Pierce was Reagan’s sole African American cabinet officer. Concerns were raised in the African American community that Pierce was being manipulated as a token presence in an otherwise conservative white administration.

Pierce was the only cabinet officer to serve for both of Reagan’s terms. He was by his later admission an ineffective manager. Because he seldom garnered national attention, the media dubbed him “Silent Sam.” Pierce perhaps was best known for attending a reception at the White House with the U.S. Conference of Mayors in the first year of the Reagan presidency at which Reagan failed to recognize him. During Pierce’s tenure, as part of Reagan’s downsizing of government spending programs, HUD drastically cut appropriations for low-income housing and housing starts. Defining a consistent housing policy, however, never interested Pierce (he privately regarded the appointment as a stepping-stone to an eventual Supreme Court nomination), and he routinely relied on committees to maintain the business of the department, overseeing thousands of government housing contracts.

After Pierce left office, his tenure became the subject of more than five years of public investigations conducted by Congress and the Office of the Independent Counsel. He was implicated in the widespread misuse of department monies and accused of favoritism in extending lucrative contracts for federal housing projects to connected developers. Although several high-ranking officials in the department—all close associates of Pierce—eventually were charged and convicted, Pierce himself was never indicted. He never participated in any public defense of his behavior, only decrying the bloated bureaucracy of the department that, he claimed, made accountability virtually impossible. Past seventy, Pierce retired to his Long Island home. He died in Washington, D.C., on October 31, 2000.

Significance

Despite five decades of well-respected work as a lawyer and public service in which he tirelessly promoted African American civil rights, Pierce became best known for his much-criticized management of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He was the highest-ranking African American in the Reagan administration and oversaw hundreds of millions of federal dollars earmarked for urban development.

Bibliography

McGlone, Catherine. New York Times v. Sullivan and the Freedom of the Press: Debating Supreme Court Decisions. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: Enslow, 2005. Competent review of the landmark libel case that established Pierce’s national reputation. Written for young adults.

Schaller, Michael. Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980’s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Regarded as one of the most balanced chronicles of the eight years of the Reagan presidency. Includes extensive coverage of the scandals that plagued Reagan’s second term.

Welfeld, Irving H. HUD Scandals: Howling Headlines and Silent Fiascos. Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction, 1992. Methodical and highly readable look at the troubling implications of the housing subsidies scandal that defined Pierce’s tenure.