Man vs. the state: Economist Walter E. Williams reflects on his long career battling Jim Crow, big government, and liberal orthodoxy.

• Author: Root, Damon
• Position: Up from the Projects: An Autobiography - Book review

Up From the Projects: An Autobiography, by Walter E. Williams, Hoover Institution Press, 150 pages, $24.95

ON MAY 29, 1963, Pvt. Walter E. Williams of the U.S. Army's 30th Infantry Division wrote a letter to President John F. Kennedy denouncing the pervasive racism of the American government and military. The armed forces may have been officially integrated at that point, but as Williams knew from firsthand experience, Jim Crow was still alive and well on military bases throughout the South and overseas. "Should Negroes be relieved of their service obligation or continue defending and dying for empty promises of freedom and equality?" Williams demanded. "Or should we demand human rights as our Founding Fathers did at the risk of being called extremists.... I contend that we relieve ourselves of oppression in a manner that is in keeping with the great heritage of our nation."

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It wasn't the first time Walter Williams came out swinging against the government, and it wouldn't be the last. A self-described "crazy-ass man who insisted on talking about liberty in America," Williams ultimately established himself as one of the country's leading libertarian voices, serving as the chairman of George Mason University's economics department from 1995 to 2001, writing a nationally syndicated column that now appears in more than 140 newspapers, and filling in as a regular guest host for talk radio giant Rush Limbaugh. (Williams is also a trustee emeritus of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine.) In Up From the Projects: An Autobiography, the 74-year-old Williams offers a revealing and sometimes hilarious account of his rise from Philadelphia's Richard Allen Homes, where his neighbors included a young Bill Cosby, to "brown bag" lunches at the White House, where he gave advice to President Ronald Reagan and his staff.

The author of seven books and dozens of academic articles, Williams is perhaps best known for his rigorous, fact-based argument that the free market is a force for racial equality. "Instead of racial discrimination and bigotry, it is the 'rules of the game' that account for many of the economic handicaps faced by blacks," he wrote in his groundbreaking 1982 book The State Against Blacks. As Williams explained, those rules included occupational licensing laws that prevented African Americans from working in numerous trades, labor legislation that gave monopoly bargaining power to...