WILSON, WILLIAM JULIUS

born Dec. 20, 1935, Derry Township, Penn., U.S. African-American sociologist whose views on race and urban poverty helped shape U.S. public policy and academic discourse. Wilson was educated at Wilberforce University (B.A., 1958), Bowling Green State University (M.A., 1961), and Washington State University (Ph.D., 1966) and became an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) in 1965. At the University of Chicago he conducted research and wrote on inner city poverty for 24 years (197296), then moved to Harvard University. In two seminal works, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978) and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987), Wilson maintained that class divisions and global economic changes, more than racism, created a large black underclass. In When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996), he showed how chronic joblessness deprived those in the inner city of skills necessary to obtain and keep jobs. Wilson disputed the liberal stance that the black underclass (a term he later abandoned) owed its existence to entrenched racial discrimination; he also disagreed with the conservative view that black poverty was due to cultural deficiencies and welfare dependency. Instead, Wilson implicated sweeping changes in the global economy that pulled low-skilled manufacturing jobs out of the inner city, the flight from the ghetto of its most successful residents, and the lingering effects of past discrimination. He believed that the problems of the underclass could be alleviated only by race neutral programs such as universal health care and government-financed jobs.