In an interview in 2018, the economist Thomas Sowell had a concise answer when podcaster and commentator Dave Rubin asked what awakened him to the failures of Marxism, an ideology he had espoused in his youth.

“Facts!” Sowell replied.

In his decadeslong career, Sowell’s commitment to the facts at the expense of popular approval and, sometimes, career advancement has captured audiences young and old, black and white, rich and poor.

But Sowell isn’t much concerned with his fame, even if it is an encouraging indicator of how well his ideas have been received. //

To be a conservative who is black is to expose oneself to undue amounts of absurd criticism, and Sowell’s experience was no exception.

Riley writes that Sowell and the late economist Walter Williams, a protegee and friend of Sowell’s, used to joke that “they never flew together, because if the plane went down there would be no black conservatives left.”

But Sowell had “felt the pain and humiliation of racism firsthand throughout his life,” and “needed no lectures from anyone on the evils of Jim Crow,” Riley writes.

For instance, many claimed that Sowell’s book “Ethnic America: A History” argued that discrimination against blacks did not exist. But Sowell actually was arguing that “discrimination alone was an insufficient explanation of social inequality.”

Sowell, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution since 1980, certainly was not a pawn of white economists, even the ones he admired and learned from.

Milton Friedman, a friend and mentor, said that Sowell “has a mind of his own, insists on making it up for himself, and on getting the evidence necessary to form a valid judgment.” In fact, Sowell saw his views on racial matters as entirely in line with that of black civil rights leaders of the past.

“If anything,” Riley writes, “Sowell’s analyses are in the tradition of his fellow black forebearers, not his white contemporaries.” Black leaders of the past such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, he writes, “shared Sowell’s deep skepticism of government benevolence and the lowering of standards to facilitate black advancement.”