Walter Massey, a physicist with a higher calling

And unlike pop culture images of theoretical physicists – scribbling lonely on blackboards, shrouded in clouds of chalk dust – Dr. Massey likes to work with people. In turn, people regard him highly enough to say his name in the right rooms. He completes one project, and it’s not long before another project falls on his lap. He also has a tendency to take over organizations that need some guidance, most recently the Giant Magellan, which is facing financial turmoil.

Dr. Massey’s involvement in the telescope project came near the end of a presidency at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At a board meeting of the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, Robert Zimmer, then president of the University of Chicago, approached him about a position on the board of the Giant Magellan. A year later, Dr. Massey elected chairman.

But of all his messages and awards, one stands out, said Dr. Massey. In 1995, he assumed the presidency of his alma mater, Morehouse College, a historically black men’s college in Atlanta and the site of Dr. King. “Without Morehouse,” he said, “I just wouldn’t be who I am.”

Torn between worlds

Dr. Massey grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss., during the height of segregation. If you were black, he remembered, you sat on the balcony at the movie theater, rode in the back of the bus, and slipped through the side entrances of stores—if you could shop there at all. And if there was a white person on the sidewalk, you moved aside.

Desperate to leave, he was thrilled when, at age 16, he won a scholarship to Morehouse. But he soon realized that his classmates looked down on people from Mississippi. “And so I said, ‘I’ll show them,’” said Dr. Massey. “What is the most difficult subject?” He chose physics because he felt he had something to prove.

In a consortium of four colleges, he was the only student in his year studying physics. But he was never lonely. On the contrary, he liked to lose himself in comparisons. Years later, in his memoirsdescribed Dr. Massey a “total absorption as close to a meditative state as I have ever achieved.”

He parlayed that passion into a doctoral program at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied how liquid helium behaved near absolute zero. In 1966, he earned his doctorate and joined a cohort of more than a dozen black physicists across the country who had accomplished the same feat.

Shortly afterwards, Dr. Massey to Chicago to work at the nearby Argonne National Laboratory, where he studied the strange behavior of sound waves in superliquid helium, which seemed to defy the laws of physics. His work attracted the attention of researchers at Urbana-Champaign and of Anthony Leggett, a theorist at the University of Sussex in England, whose understanding of helium would later win him the Nobel Prize for Physics.