Walter Williams left a tremendous intellectual legacy built around his belief that free markets and a truly liberal society were best for everyone — black, white, Asian, anything.
In this essay, Professor John Sibley Butler of the University of Texas looks at his uncompromising advocacy of freedom. He writes,
As an economist, he used the free market to understand and explain Americans through time and space. As such, he stands in a long line of scholars and writers such as Henry M. Minton, Booker T. Washington, Abram L. Harris and, T.M. Pryor, all of whom studied Black American historical data. They all placed Black Americans squarely in the tradition of taking their problems to the free market to find the solution to the question ‘How can Black Americans live in America.’ Indeed, the gift to Americans, for Williams, is the free market, which produces and is the very thing that helps to define liberty.
Walter Williams was a great scholar, but he probably couldn’t get hired if he were applying for an academic post today. That’s because he’d be washed out on his “diversity statement,” in which he’d say something like, “I believe in holding everyone to high standards.”
Read the whole thing.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/walter-williams-and-the-case-for-liberty/