August Meier was born on April 30, 1923 in New York, NY to Frank A. and Clara M. Meier. Meier grew up in Newark, NJ. His father was a chemist with the American Platinum Association. Between 1940-1945, Meier attended Oberlin College; one year during this time was spent working at a War Department agency in Newark where one-third of the employees were African-American. Experiences at this agency gave impetus to Meier’s decision to teach at a black college and he began to study race relations and black history. Meier graduated from Oberlin College in 1945 with a major in history and completed graduate degrees at Columbia University (A.M., 1949; Ph.D., 1957).

Although Meier was born to a German father and East European Jewish mother, he dedicated his life’s work to the advancement of African-American studies. He described his last two years at Oberlin as “activist years,” which was a pivotal time for a number of reasons. Along with other students, he protested traditional Jim Crowism, specifically segregated barbershops. He was involved in the Committees of Correspondence and the United States Student Assembly. After completing his education, Meier taught history at black colleges for twenty years. He began his teaching career at Tougaloo College (1945-49) and later taught at Fisk University (1953-56), Morgan State College (1957-64), and Roosevelt University, Chicago (1964-67). In 1967, He was recruited by Kent State University to support its graduate program in history (1967-93; professor emeritus, 1993-2003). In 1969, he was appointed the rank of professor in the KSU History Department. Meier's presence in the KSU History Department helped the program gain recognition in the history profession. He was instrumental in building the library’s African-American collection through the purchase of microfilm.

During his professional career, Meier was active in several civil rights organizations. He was secretary of the Newark branch of the NAACP from 1951-52 and from 1956-57, and was a member of the Baltimore chapter of SNCC (1960-63) and CORE (1963-64). His dedication to African-American studies earned him several awards, including an advanced graduate fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (1952), a Guggenheim fellowship (1971-72), a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (1975-77), and a fellowship for the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (1976-77).

Meier is the author or editor of twelve books, including Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (1963), From Plantation to Ghetto (1976, with Elliott Rudwick, Department of Sociology, KSU), Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980 (1986, with Elliott Rudwick), and The Making of Black America (1969, with Elliott Rudwick and John H. Bracey, Jr.). He served as the editor of the series Blacks in the New World published by the University of Illinois Press. Sixteen of Meier’s essays, written between 1945 and 1965, were reprinted under the title A White Scholar and the Black Community (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992).

In 1998, Meier received the American Historical Association’s award for scholarship distinction.

Meier never married. He died on March 19, 2003 at his home in New York City. His brother, Paul A. Meier, was also a 1945 Oberlin College graduate.