Walter Williams – Up from the Projects: An Autobiography (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2010)
Williams, in typically blunt fashion, said that his purpose in writing this short (160 pages) autobiography wasn’t self-aggrandizement. It was to make it harder for people to misquote him. It also gave him something to refer journalists to, rather than waste time answering the same old questions over and over. It pairs well with Suffer No Fools, a documentary on Williams’ life released around the same time.
I wrote about the arc of Williams’ life in my recent tribute to him. The short version is that he was born poor in Philadelphia. He was smart but not necessarily obedient, though he wasn’t afraid of working hard when he wanted to. He worked as a cab driver for a while, spent some time in California with his father, and spent two years in the army in the Jim Crow south. He caused enough good trouble to be shipped off to Korea, and then honorably discharged. Outside of the military, he was also arrested three times for causing good trouble, and was once the victim of a racially motivated police beating in Philadelphia while driving his cab.
Williams eventually discovered economics, and earned his Ph.D at UCLA when its department was ranked 12th in the country. One of his teachers was Armen Alchian, justly considered one of the world’s top price theorists. Williams eventually wound his way to George Mason University in 1980, where he would teach until the day he died.
Williams’ rare gift for clearly communicating economic ideas gave him national prominence, and helped give Mason’s fledgling economics department a national reputation. He wrote a long-running column, frequently appeared on radio and television, and, oddly, was a frequent fill-in host for Rush Limbaugh. Williams also continued to teach George Mason’s first-year Ph.D-level microeconomics course, which became a rite of passage for grad students.
Inertia Wins! 