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Bob Chitester: Well in the United States today, in 1987, race still influences people’s
behavior. Um, how do you deal with the problem?
Walter Williams: Well, um, I’m not quite sure whether or not I have a program for dealing
with the problem, but I know that while race has been an important detriment to blacks
in general historically I doubt whether it is a, an important or as important detriment
today. I think for all intents and purposes in the United States, blacks do have their
constitutional guarantees and the problems that blacks face today are not really race.
That is the civil rights struggle is over and won in the Unites States, which doesn’t
mean that their, that all the problems have come to an end, but what it does mean is that
they’re not civil rights problems.
Chitester: Civil rights in the sense of status within the law, within society.
Williams: That’s right. That is absolutely right. And I’m not denying the existence
of discrimination, but what I hold and what my colleague Tom Sowell holds is that discrimination
can just not explain all of what we see. It has nowhere the explanatory power that it
used to have.
Chitester: What was your, personally, your most upsetting confrontation with racism?
Williams: Well, I guess, I guess it was while I was in the Army. I was drafted and I was
sent to first to Fort Jackson in South Carolina and to Fort Stewart Georgia, and I had a , I
had considerable difficulties adjusting to the southern way of life and I had many fights
on base. Maybe many is too strong a word, maybe about 4 or 5. I had many confrontations with
lawyers, I was, I had a special courts marshal which I won by the way, and eventually the
conflict lead to my being sent to Korea, as a way of getting rid of me. Now, a lot of
those confrontations that I encountered were, you could call them self-inflicted, that is
this is back in 1959 and 60 I recall, when I was in the Army, and I used to organize
the black soldiers to go to the dance on the wrong night. That is they had on the Army
post they had a white dance and a black dance, well I organized the black soldiers to go
to the white dance, and um, and when one of my colleagues asked a young lady for a dance
the dance was called to an end and there was a lot of problems that lead to my being charged
with in-sighting a riot. But, uh, and also I challenged my duties as a soldier in light
of the fact that I did not have constitutional guarantees. So had I remained quite at Fort
Stewart, I would not have encountered nearly as many problems as I did, but I decided to
rock the boat. Now, looking back on the situation, where I got a lot of threats. Fellows telling
me not to come off the post or telling me that the Klu Klux Klan would be waiting for
me, but looking back on the situation I would have never done it, because when you’re
young you tend to think that you’re invincible but when you get older you can recognize that
one of those fellows could have taken me to the oakie fenokee swamps down there and I
would have never been heard of afterwards.
Chitester: Well, we’re pleased that you survived that experience.
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