Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City

Journal. Joining me on the show today is

Jason Riley. Jason is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal,

and a commentator for Fox News. He was awarded the Bradley Prize in 2018, and he's the author of a terrific

new book that will be our topic of discussion today,

the just released Maverick, a biography of Thomas Sowell.

Jason, thanks very much for joining us.

Good to be here, Brian.

Thomas Sol's early life, growing up in Harlem, serving in the military, going on to Ida League schools, it's quite a

compelling story.

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about his upbringing and how that upbringing

led him to form his views on economics, how he moved away from a kind of orthodox Marxist position in his youth

and toward a more free market position?

Sure.

He, you know, it's not that uncommon for conservatives today to have started out on the left.

You know, Milton Friedman started on the left. Ronald Reagan started out on the left.

It's especially true of black conservatives who not only start out slightly left of center, but way, way on the left.

You mentioned Sol starting out as a Marxist, but Clarence Thomas was a Black Panther in college.

Walter Williams, the late Walter Williams, another free market economist, was far more sympathetic

to the views of Malcolm X in his youth than to the views of Martin Luther King.

Shelby Steele, another race scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was a leftist radical in his early days. So it's not uncommon, and soul sort of fits that

pattern. He was born in 1930 in the Jim Crow South, so this is a depression era, a very poor

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