Remembering Walter Williams

He was one of a kind.

In his January 31, 2025 proclamation of Black History Month, President Trump stated:

Throughout our history, black Americans have been among our country’s most consequential leaders, shaping the cultural and political destiny of our Nation in profound ways. American heroes such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Thomas Sowell, Justice Clarence Thomas, and countless others represent what is best in America and her citizens.

I’m so glad he did that. When has a U.S. president ever singled out Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas for Black History Month? I can’t remember an instance.

I want to mention someone else, though, who deserved to be mentioned: economist Walter Williams.

Walter died in December 2020 and I wrote about him in “Appreciating Walter Williams,” Defining Ideas, January 22, 2021.

Some excerpts from my article:

On December 2, just hours after teaching his last class at George Mason University, economist Walter Williams died. He was eighty-four. That same day, I wrote a short appreciation of Walter that led to something unprecedented in my twelve years of blogging: comments by dozens of people, almost none of whom I knew, all complimentary. Our blog, EconLog, is one of the best at weeding out nasty, abusive comments. This time, though, there was nothing to weed out.

It’s easy to see why because Walter was an attractive person in so many ways. He had an inquisitive mind, a powerful work ethic, incredible courage, a great sense of humor, a strong sense of justice, and an ability not just to teach economic understanding but also to sell economic freedom. He did so in hundreds of syndicated columns written over four decades. If you want to understand what was so compelling about the man, you could do no better than read his 2010 autobiography, Up from the Projects. But Walter would have been the first person to remind you that your time is your most valuable resource. So if you’re in a time crunch, read my article instead.

Another excerpt:

That taught him another important lesson, not about work, but about the harm done by regulation. One of the company’s employees complained to the labor department that the company was hiring child labor. When the official from the labor department asked him about his work, Walter naively “thought they were acting in my interest to get me a higher wage.” He soon learned the truth: the government was trying to get him a zero wage by preventing him from working. It took until his PhD economics program at UCLA in the late 1960s, though, for Walter to put it all together. One of his professors, Armen Alchian, asked him if he cared about the intentions behind a minimum wage or about its effects. If he cared about its effects, said Alchian, he should read some work by University of Chicago economist Yale Brozen that showed the minimum wage law’s devastating effects on opportunities for unskilled workers.

My favorite excerpt:

Getting that degree changed his life. He failed his economic theory exam the first time around. That convinced him “that UCLA professors didn’t care anything about [his] race.” Through the rest of his life, Walter applied the same standards to his employers and his students. He told potential employers that if he learned that he was hired because he was black, he would resign immediately. He also held black students to the same standards as white students, and called out his colleagues when they held black students to lower standards. In Walter’s mind, they were racists. Not “reverse racists,” a term you can’t find in any of his writing, just racists.

His strict standards led to a number of conflicts with colleagues when he was on Temple University’s faculty in the late 1970s. A colleague and friend, Lynn Holmes, told Walter that he shouldn’t blame faculty resentment of him on racism, laughingly adding, “Walter, even if you were white, people wouldn’t like you.”

And my ending paragraph:

Once, when I was being interviewed with Walter and our Hoover colleague John Taylor, I told Walter that my second-favorite laugh was his. (My favorite is my daughter’s.) Walter Williams was one of a kind. I will miss him and this is at a time when the United States needs his wisdom more than ever.

Read the whole thing.