Thomas Sowell announced in his column slated for publication Tuesday he will be laying down his pen after 25 years.
Sowell, at age 86, said he is ready to finally stop having to keep up with what is being said in the media.
"During a stay in Yosemite National Park last May, taking photos with a couple of my buddies, there were four consecutive days without seeing a newspaper or a television news program — and it felt wonderful," he writes. "With the political news being so awful this year, it felt especially wonderful."
Sowell was born in North Carolina in 1930, and grew up in Harlem, before graduating from Harvard and Columbia universities with degrees in economics. He earned a doctorate from the University of Chicago.
Sowell prefers not to be known as a "black conservative," but has said if he must be labeled he prefers "libertarian" – though he disagrees with parts of that movement. His writings, including more than 40 books, often focus on free-market capitalism, his opposition to racial quotas and gun control.
"With all the advances of blacks over the years, nothing so brought home to me the social degeneration in black ghettoes like a visit to a Harlem high school some years ago," he writes in his farewell column.
"When I looked out the window at the park across the street, I mentioned that, as a child, I used to walk my dog in that park. Looks of horror came over the students' faces, at the thought of a kid going into the hell hole which that park had become in their time."
Fans on Twitter expressed sadness they would no longer be reading Sowell's columns:
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