Biography

Walter Williams was born on March 31, 1936 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was married to Conchetta Taylor. He died on December 1, 2020 in Fairfax, Virginia, USA.

Refers to himself as "Williams" in his columns

Economist, syndicated columnist, and author.

Professor of economics at George Mason University.

[M]y daughter has experienced more white privilege than probably 95 percent of white Americans. She's attended private schools, had ballet and music lessons, traveled the world, and lived in upper-income communities. Leftists should get rid of the concept of white privilege and just call it achievement.

There's no way that four or five years of college can repair the academic damage done to black students throughout their 13 years of primary and secondary education.

Rewriting American history is going to be challenging. Just imagine the task of purifying the nation's currency. Slave owner George Washington's picture graces the $1 bill. Slave owner Thomas Jefferson's picture is on the $2 bill. Slave-owning Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's picture is on our $50 bill. Benjamin Franklin's picture is on the $100 bill.

Today the overwhelming majority of black children are raised in single female-headed families. As early as the 1880s, three-quarters of black families were two-parent. In 1925 New York City, 85 percent of black families were two-parent. One study of 19th-century slave families found that in up to three-fourths of the families, all the children had the same mother and father.

A society's first line of defense is not the law or the criminal justice system but customs, traditions and moral values. These behavioral norms, mostly imparted by example, word-of-mouth and religious teachings, represent a body of wisdom distilled over the ages through experience and trial and error. Police and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct.