Thomas Sowell, an underappreciated American scholar, turns 90

Dr. Thomas Sowell has been both a friend and a colleague of mine for over a half-century.
On June 30, he will have completed his 90th year of life, and I want to highlight some important features of that life. Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. As part of the great black migration northward during the 1930s and ’40s, he and his family moved to Harlem, New York. Sowell attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School but dropped out. In 1951, he was drafted into the milita