Thomas Sowell’s Autobiography, A Personal Odyssey: A Review

Reviewed by Nicholas Stix

Imagine you’re a five-year-old Negro orphan without so much as a pot to pee in, growing up in segregated North Carolina in 1935. What can you hope to do when you grow up? Become a farm laborer? Join the Great Migration, to work in northern factories? Or how about, become America’s most brilliant social scientist, aka Thomas Sowell?

Economist Thomas Sowell may have graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and have a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, but the most important “degree” he ever earned surely came from “UCLA” -- “the University at the Corner of Lenox Ave.” -- as the old Harlem saying would have it.

Sowell has written on economic theory, race and ethnicity, education, political philosophy, cultural history, even late-talking children, in relatively simple and unpretentious prose. Readers of his curmudgeonly newspaper column know that he was born in the South, grew up in Harlem, dropped out of high school, and served in the United States Marine Corps. Here he fills out that picture. This book is a self-portrait of a man who since childhood has always gone his own way, and spoken his piece, petty tyrants be damned, even if that meant having to back up his words with his fists.

By the time Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina in 1930, his father, Henry, had died. His mother, "Willie," overwhelmed with four older children to feed on her salary as a domestic, turned to her aunt, Molly Sowell. Molly, already some sixty years old, and her husband (whose name we are never told), adopted the child, Buddy, whom they renamed Thomas Sowell, and raised as their own.

Under the pretext of visiting her aunt, Willie would frequently visit Buddy. But a few years later, she died in childbirth, and Sowell was not to know of his true siblings until he was an adult. As a child, he knew of his aunt and uncle only as “Mama” and “Daddy.”

In North Carolina, young Thomas had so few dealings with white folks, that when he saw “yellow-haired” characters in a comic strip, he did not believe that such people existed. When he was nine, “Mama,” by now separated from her husband, took him and her grown-up daughters, Ruth and “Birdie,” north to Harlem. In New York, the youngster discovered that yellow-haired people really did exist.

Despite his humble beginnings, Sowell considers himself lucky: Lucky that he was spared the worst of southern racism and the destruction of New York City’s public schools, and lucky that he was able to establish himself professionally prior to the age of affirmative action, which has since cast a cloud over all blacks’ achievements.

Not that Sowell romanticizes his school days. For though he depicts his teachers in New York City as vastly superior to their semi-literate successors, he indicts them as having been consumed with wielding power over children. In young Sowell, who depicts himself as having been an incorrigible smart-ass, more than a few met their match.

Unfortunately, it was not only in institutional settings that Sowell clashed with those who would abuse authority.

As she grew older, “Mama” increasingly became “Mama Dearest,” lying and bullying, and even manipulating the police and courts, in seeking to force the teenager to submit to her, and give up any hopes he had of making something of himself. The conflict resulted in Sowell’s dropping out of New York’s elite, Stuyvesant High School.

Leaving home at the tender age of 17, Sowell subsisted on low-paying, dangerous, unreliable jobs as a messenger and in machine shops. Eventually, he earned his high school equivalency diploma, and after military service attended night school at black Howard University in Washington, D.C., a dismal experience, before being accepted by Harvard.

Sowell shows that already in the early 1970s, students (aided by opportunistic administrators) were telling professors what to do -- including what grades to give them. Such pathologies hastened his departure from academia. I can think of no more damning indictment of academia than that it can welcome with open arms the Andrew Hackers and Leonard Jeffrieses of the world, but has no room for Thomas Sowell.

Noting that he is not even registered to vote, Sowell mocks the notion of his being a Republican operative as a myth spun out of whole cloth by journalistic antagonists such as the recently deceased Carl Rowan. While he has little to say about politicians -- virtually none of it complimentary -- he fondly recalls the two brief encounters he had with President Ronald Reagan.

Sowell thought that Reagan had much to offer black Americans, but lamented that The Great Communicator was lost, when it came to connecting with them.

Sowell briefly notes that he occasionally suffered from racial discrimination. He has three points to make about such matters. 1. Determine that a situation is actually characterized by racial discrimination, rather than some other reason. 2. It is often better to confront racism directly, whether verbally or through a punch in the nose, than through lawsuits and legislation. 3. Perhaps most important, whites who have been caught discriminating against qualified blacks, have tended to compound their misdeed, by then hiring unqualified blacks, based solely on the color of their skin.

Sowell’s main shortcoming is in failing to portray his own intellectual development, from his youthful Marxism, to becoming Marx’ most trenchant American critic. A secondary weakness is his botching of the rare chronicling of his adult personal life. At one point, Sowell mentions the entry of a new woman into his life, but the next time he mentions a name, it is of a different woman entirely.

As readable as this book is, Sowell is unable or unwilling to meet the standard he set with his earlier works.

In a world of hype, whole herds of writers may claim -- through their press agents -- to be iconoclasts. A Personal Odyssey shows what really goes into leading such a life, and the price it exacts -- a price few are willing to pay.

A Different Drummer, January 3, 2001.