Walter E. Williams

Walter Edward Williams (March 31, 1936December 1, 2020) was an American economist, commentator, and academic.

Williams was the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist and author.

Known for his classical liberal and libertarian views, Williams's writings frequently appeared in Townhall, WND, and Jewish World Review.

Williams was also a popular guest host of the Rush Limbaugh radio show when Limbaugh was unavailable.

Williams was born in Philadelphia on March 31, 1936.

His family during childhood consisted of his mother, his sister, and him; Williams's father played no role in raising Williams or his sister.

The family initially lived in West Philadelphia, moving to North Philadelphia and the Richard Allen housing projects when Williams was ten years old.

Among his neighbors was a young Bill Cosby.

Williams knew many of the individuals that Cosby speaks of from his childhood, including Weird Harold and Fat Albert.

After graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School, Williams traveled to California to live with his father and attend Los Angeles City College for one semester.

He later returned to Philadelphia and secured a job as a cab driver for the Yellow Cab Company.

In 1959, he was drafted into the military and served as a private in the United States Army.

While stationed in the South, Williams "waged a one-man battle against Jim Crow from inside the army."

He challenged the racial order with provocative statements to his fellow soldiers.

This resulted in an overseeing officer filing a court-martial proceeding against Williams.

Williams argued his own case and was found not guilty.

While considering filing countercharges against the officer who had brought him up for court martial, Williams found himself transferred to Korea.

Upon arriving there, Williams marked "Caucasian" for race on his personnel form.

When challenged on this, Williams replied wryly if he had marked "Black," he would end up getting all the worst jobs.

From Korea, Williams wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy denouncing the pervasive racism in the American government and military and questioning the actions black Americans should take given the state of affairs, writing:

"Should Negroes be relieved of their service obligation or continue defending and dying for empty promises of freedom and equality? Or should we demand human rights as our Founding Fathers did at the risk of being called extremists? I contend that we relieve ourselves of oppression in a manner that is in keeping with the great heritage of our nation."

He received a reply from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Alfred B. Fitt, a response which he termed "the most reasonable response that I received from any official."

Following his military service, Williams served as a juvenile group supervisor for the Los Angeles County Probation Department from 1963 to 1967.

Williams also resumed his education, earning a bachelor's degree in economics in 1965 from California State College at Los Angeles (now Cal State Los Angeles).

He earned both his master's degree and his PhD in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Williams's doctoral thesis was titled The Low-Income Market Place.

Speaking of his early college days, Williams said: "I was more than anything a radical. I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King, because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence. But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence."

During his time at UCLA, Williams came into contact with economists such as Armen Alchian, James M. Buchanan, and Axel Leijonhufvud who challenged his assumptions.

During his doctoral studies, Williams was an instructor in economics at Los Angeles City College from 1967 to 1969, and at Cal State Los Angeles from 1967 to 1971.

While Williams was attending UCLA, Thomas Sowell arrived on campus in 1969 as a visiting professor.

Although he never took a class from Dr. Sowell, the two met and began a friendship that lasted for decades.

In the summer of 1972, Sowell was hired as director of the Urban Institute's Ethnic Minorities Project, which Williams joined shortly thereafter.

After returning to his native Philadelphia, Williams taught economics at Temple University from 1973 to 1980.

For the 1975–76 academic year, Williams was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In 1980, Williams joined the economics faculty at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

That same year, Williams began writing a syndicated column, "A Minority View", for Heritage Features Syndicate, which merged with Creators Syndicate in 1991.

From 1995 to 2001, Williams chaired the economics department at George Mason.

Courses taught by Williams at George Mason include "Intermediate Microeconomics" for undergraduate students and "Microeconomic Theory I" for graduate students.

Correspondence between Sowell and Williams appears in "A Man of Letters," a 2007 autobiography authored by Sowell.

Williams continued to teach at George Mason until his death in 2020.