Walter E. Williams, a prominent conservative economist, author and political commentator who expressed profoundly skeptical views of government efforts to aid his fellow African-Americans and other minority groups, died on Tuesday on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia, where he had taught for 40 years. He was 84.
His daughter, Devon Williams, said he died suddenly in his car after he had finished teaching a class. She said he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and hypertension.
As a public intellectual, Mr. Williams moved easily between the classroom and public forums that gave him wide reach. He wrote a syndicated column, lectured across the country and frequently appeared on the radio as a substitute host for the ardently conservative Rush Limbaugh.
The author of about a dozen books, including “The State Against Blacks,” Mr. Williams was the subject of a 2014 PBS documentary, “Suffer No Fools,” in which he maintained that antipoverty programs were subsidizing “slovenly” behavior.
“The welfare state has done to Black Americans what slavery could not have done, Jim Crow and the harshest racism could not have done — namely to destroy the Black family,” Mr. Williams declared in “Suffer No Fools.”
