Thomas sowell who is

In , the year he was born into a black family in Gastonia, North Carolina, the Great Depression was gathering strength. And Jim Crow was in full force, so he seldom encountered white people in his early years. He needed no lectures from anyone on the evils of Jim Crow.

His father had died a few months before his birth, and his mother, a housemaid, already had four children. So he was raised by a great-aunt. The family moved to Harlem when he was nine, part of the great migration of black families from the South to the North in search of greater opportunity in those years.

Forced to drop out of high school to get a job, he only went to college after a stint in the Marines during the Korean War. He was the first member of his family to get beyond the seventh grade, and he was ignorant of even the basics of higher education. Certainly I had no plans to get either. At first he attended night classes at the historically black Howard University. There, his professors noted his remarkable intellect and capacity for hard work and helped him transfer to Harvard the next year.

He thrived there intellectually and graduated at the age of twenty-eight magna cum laude. But he was less enamored of the social atmosphere in Cambridge.

Chicago was not an imitation of anything. His father, a construction worker, did not encourage Sowell to pursue higher education even though he showed early signs of academic promise.

Sowell dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, worked at various jobs, and obtained a high school degree in an evening program. After two years of service with the U. His positions with government and the private sector included the U. With the election of Ronald Reagan as President in Sowell was offered a position with the new administration, which he declined because he felt it would detract from an academic career.

When I explained that I would not lower my standards, there were a lot of student complaints and a lot of controversy. Some went to the dean to have me fired. By the end, students were lobbying for me to stay. Sowell feels that intellectual rigor, whatever the subject, is needed in education to prepare students for the world outside the academy.

Something sounds good right now and sounds good in the media, so they do it. For example, when Nixon introduced wage and price controls, it sounded good at the time, but it was a disaster, just as it had been when Diocletian passed the same laws in the days of the Roman Empire. See Sowell's personal website. Awards and Honors:. Rita Ricardo-Campbell and W. Glenn Campbell Uncommon Book Award National Humanities Medal Bradley Prize Type Articles Books Essays Podcasts.

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