His father, also Samuel Pierce, came from Virginia to New York as a young man in 1899 during the early years of the Great Migration of Black Americans who were fleeing Jim Crow laws and poor economic opportunities.

[1][note 1] Pierce (senior) worked at the Nassau Country Club, on Long Island, for over forty years.

[4] Pierce served in the United States Army's Criminal Investigation Division during World War II.

[6] Pierce was appointed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to serve as a judge of the New York City Court of General Sessions, 1959–1960.

[5] According to several former aides and HUD employees, Pierce, uninterested in his job, would often delegate important decisions to advisors and would watch television in his office.

[8] Through the 1990s many of Pierce's closest aides and confidants at the department were charged and convicted on felony charges related to the political favoritism and inappropriate expenditures that pervaded the department during Pierce's tenure (Thomas Demery, Phillip Winn, Joseph Strauss and Deborah Gore Dean).