William E. Spriggs, who in a four-decade career in economics sought to root out racial injustice in society and in his own profession, died on Tuesday in Reston, Va. He was 68.
The A.F.L.-C.I.O., for which Dr. Spriggs had been chief economist for more than a decade, announced his death. His wife of 38 years, Jennifer Spriggs, said the cause was a stroke.
One of the most prominent Black economists of his generation, Dr. Spriggs served as an assistant secretary of labor in the Obama administration and held other public-sector roles earlier in his career. But he was best known for his work outside of government as an outspoken and frequently quoted advocate for workers, especially Black workers.
In addition to his role at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., based in Washington, he was a professor at Howard University, where he mentored a generation of Black economists while pushing for change within a field dominated by white men.
“Bill was somebody who was deeply committed to the idea that we do economics because we have a social purpose,” William A. Darity Jr., a Duke University economist and longtime friend, said in a phone interview. “That this is not a discipline that should be deployed just for playing parlor games, and that we should use the ideas that we develop from economics for the design of social policy that will make the lives of most people far better.”
Dr. Spriggs worked on varied issues, including trade, education, the minimum wage and Social Security. But the topic he came back to most frequently, and spoke most passionately about, was that of racial disparities in the labor market. Black Americans, he pointed out time and again, consistently experienced unemployment at double the rate of white people — a troubling fact that he argued got too little attention among economists.
“Economists have tried to rationalize this disparity by saying it merely reflects differences in skill levels,” Dr. Spriggs wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times in 2021, before going on to dismiss that claim with a striking statistic: The unemployment rate for white high school dropouts is almost always below that of overall Black unemployment.
During the nationwide racial reckoning after the death of George Floyd in 2020, Dr. Spriggs wrote an open letter to his fellow economists that was sharply critical of the field’s approach to race — not just in its failure to recruit and retain Black economists, which had been widely documented, but also in economic research.
“Modern economics has a deep and painful set of roots that too few economists acknowledge,” Dr. Spriggs wrote. “In the hands of far too many economists, it remains with the assumption that African Americans are inferior until proven otherwise.”
Biden administration officials said they had discussed appointing Dr. Spriggs to senior economic policy roles as recently as this year. In the end, he remained on the outside, nudging the administration in public and private not to back off its commitment to ensuring a strong economic recovery. In recent months he was a vocal critic of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive efforts to tame inflation, which Dr. Spriggs warned would disproportionately hurt Black workers.
“Bill was a towering figure in his field, a trailblazer who challenged the field’s basic assumptions about racial discrimination in labor markets, pay equity and worker empowerment,” President Biden said in a statement on Wednesday.
William Edward Spriggs was born on April 8, 1955, in Washington to Thurman and Julienne (Henderson) Spriggs. He was reared there and in Virginia. His father had served during World War II as a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen and went on to become a physics professor at Norfolk State University in Virginia and at Howard, in Washington, both historically Black institutions.
His mother was also a veteran and became a public-school teacher in Norfolk after earning her college degree while her son was in elementary school.
“I remember studying history together,” Dr. Spriggs later recalled of his mother in a White House blog post written while he was at the Labor Department. “She would check out children’s books covering the topics she was learning about.”
Dr. Spriggs earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Williams College in Massachusetts and attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a master’s degree in 1979 and a doctorate in 1984, both in economics. While in graduate school, he served as co-president of the graduate student teachers union, helping to rebuild it after a largely unsuccessful strike the year before.
Dr. Spriggs stood out at Wisconsin, and not only because he was the only Black graduate student in the economics department, recalled Lawrence Mishel, a classmate who was later president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, where Dr. Spriggs also worked for several years.
Even as a graduate student, Dr. Mishel said, Mr. Spriggs was skeptical of the orthodox theories that his professors were teaching about how companies set workers’ wages — theories that left no room for discrimination or other forces beyond supply and demand. And unlike most students, Mr. Spriggs wasn’t interested in working for the top-ranked school where he could find a job; he wanted to work for a historically Black institution, as his father had.
He got his wish, teaching first at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro and then at Norfolk State University — where his father also worked — before taking a series of jobs in government and left-leaning think tanks. He returned to academia in 2005, when he joined Howard. He was chairman of its economics department from 2005 to 2009.
In addition to his wife, whom he met in graduate school, his survivors include their son, William; and two sisters, Patricia Spriggs and Karen Baldwin.
Dr. Spriggs had a shaping hand in the careers of dozens of younger economists.
“I would not be an economist today without Bill Spriggs,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.
Dr. Wilson was taking a break from graduate school and considering leaving the field altogether when one of her professors recommended her for a job working for Dr. Spriggs at the National Urban League. He helped restore her passion for economics by showing her an approach to the work that was less theoretical and more focused on the real world, she said. After two years at the Urban League, she told Dr. Spriggs that she was going back to graduate school.
His response: “We need you in the profession.”
Jim Tankersley contributed reporting.
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