In this profile for Black History Month, the Hoover Institution commemorates the life, legacy, intellectual rigor, and many accomplishments of Walter E. Williams, prominent economist, best-selling author, and nationally influential public intellectual.
Williams was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution during the academic year of 1975–76. He served on the Board of Overseers from 1983 to 2004, and was a member of its executive committee from 1994 to 2004. His authoritative works about economics and individual liberty are recorded as the best-selling books in the history of the Hoover Institution Press.
From 1980 until he passed away on December 1, 2020, Williams was the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor at George Mason University, where he was also chair of its economics department from 1995 to 2001.
As detailed in the 2014 PBS documentary Suffer No Fools and his memoir Up from the Projects (Hoover Institution Press, 2010), Williams grew up in the housing projects of Philadelphia with a single mother. As noted in the documentary, Williams “was raised in the welfare state, but not with a welfare ideology.” At an early age, he learned the value of education and hard work.
While in high school, Williams worked various jobs, including packing shipping orders for the Sears Roebuck department store and operating a sewing machine at a hat manufacturer. In his latter job, when a seamstress discovered that he was on the payroll, she reported him to the authorities on the grounds that his employment violated child labor laws.
“I thought the labor department was on my side because I [thought they were] really trying to get me more money,” Williams explained. “After the fact, when I lost my job, I found out that they really weren’t on my side.”
Williams was inspired to study economics as an undergraduate at California State University–Los Angeles after he read W. E. B. Du Bois’s book Black Reconstruction, in which the NAACP cofounder argued that African Americans could advance in society only if they understood their nation’s economic system.
His early work experience helped spur a lifelong interest in the study of labor economics. When Williams was a national fellow at Hoover in the mid-1970s, he was commissioned by the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress to conduct a study on minimum-wage laws and the Davis-Beacon Act of 1931, which required employees of contractors on federal building projects to be paid no less than the locally prevailing compensation for similar types of work. He concluded that the former discriminated against minority youth, and the latter against Blacks working in the construction industry.
“What minimum-wage laws do is lower the cost of, and hence subsidize, racial preference indulgence. After all, if an employer must pay the same wage no matter whom he hires, the cost of discriminating in favor of the people he prefers is cheaper,” Williams held.
Drawing upon his employment as a taxi driver while attending Temple University, Williams also became critical of occupational licensing. When a city limits the number of medallions it issues for prospective drivers, it makes entry into that market much more expensive and thus disproportionately punishes less advantaged people, especially minorities.
“The price of a medallion or any license reflects the value that any owner of a license places on being in a government-protected monopoly market,” Williams argued. “It leads to higher prices and so the consumer is hurt. And it leads to outsiders not being able to get in.”
These studies culminated in the publication of Williams’s seminal 1982 book, The State against Blacks, which became his springboard into a career as a public intellectual.
Williams had a passion for teaching and demanded excellence from all of his pupils. He was an ardent critic of affirmative-action policies, because he believed they contributed to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” for Black and other minority students in the education system.
However, Williams reserved his fiercest criticism for the welfare state, arguing that such policies subsidized poverty and, most abominably, decimated the Black family structure.
"As an economist, Walter Williams never got the credit he deserved,” wrote Milton and Rose Friedman Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell in a recent tribute. “We may not see his like again. And that is our loss.”
Books by Walter E. Williams published by Hoover Institution Press:
Do the Right Thing: The People’s Economist Speaks (1995)
More Liberty Means Less Government (1999)
Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism (2008)
Up from the Projects (2010)
Race & Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination? (2011)
American Contempt for Liberty (2015)
Watch Walter Williams’s PBS documentary Suffer No Fools:
