Thomas Sowell - Biography

Biography

Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina. His father died shortly before he was born, and his mother, a housemaid, already had four children. A great-aunt and her two grown daughters adopted Sowell and raised him. In his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, he said his childhood encounters with white people were so limited that he did not believe blond was really a hair color. When Sowell was nine, his family moved from Charlotte, North Carolina to Harlem, New York City. He attended Stuyvesant High School, the first in his family to study beyond the sixth grade. However, he was forced to drop out at age 17 because of financial difficulties and problems in his home. He worked at a number of jobs, including at a machine shop and as a delivery man for Western Union, and tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948. Sowell was drafted in 1951, during the Korean War, and was assigned to the United States Marine Corps. Because of his experience in photography, he became a Marine Corps photographer; he also trained Marines in .45-caliber pistol proficiency.

After his discharge, Sowell worked a civil service job in Washington, D.C. and attended night classes at Howard University, admitted on the basis of his General Education certificate. His high scores on the College Board exams and recommendations by two professors helped him gain admission to Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He received a Master of Arts from Columbia University the following year, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

Sowell had initially chosen Columbia University to study under George Stigler (who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Economics). When he learned that Stigler had moved to the University of Chicago, he followed him there.

Sowell has taught economics at Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College, and UCLA. Since 1980 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds a fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman, his mentor.

In 1987, Sowell testified in favor of federal appeals court judge Robert Bork during the hearings for Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. In his testimony, Sowell said that Bork was "the most highly qualified nominee of this generation" and that judicial activism, a concept that Bork opposed, "has not been beneficial to minorities."

Sowell has stated that he was a Marxist “during the decade of my 20s"; one of his earliest professional publications was a sympathetic examination of Marxist thought vs. Marxist-Leninist practice. His experience working as a federal government intern during the summer of 1960 caused him to reject Marxian economics in favor of free market economic theory. During his work, Sowell discovered an association between the rise of mandated minimum wages for workers in the sugar industry of Puerto Rico and the rise of unemployment in that industry. Studying the patterns led Sowell to theorize that the government employees who administered the minimum wage law cared more about their own jobs than the plight of the poor.