Spurred by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020, economist William E. Spriggs wrote an open letter to his peers castigating them for making too many assumptions to explain racial disparities in America’s economy.

Dr. Spriggs, an economics professor at Howard University and chief economist for the AFL-CIO labor federation, noted that far too many economists assume “that African Americans are inferior until proven otherwise.”

He rebuked many economists for ignoring systemic issues and refusing to accept that racial discrimination, and not differences in skill or ability, often fueled inequities in jobless rates and wages for Black Americans. As evidence, he noted that “the unemployment rate for Black associate degree holders is so often at the level of White high school dropouts, and their pay is barely equal to that of White male high school graduates.”

Spriggs, who was widely known for his fervor in fighting for racial and economic justice, died June 6 at a hospital in Reston, Va. He was 68.

Howard University and the AFL-CIO announced his death, which occurred after a stroke.

In a statement, President Biden called Spriggs “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. His work inspired countless economists, some of whom work for our Administration, to join him in the pursuit of economic justice.”

Spriggs often seemed like a whirlwind and contradictory figure. He was a serious academic and a committed political activist. He told African American groups that they needed to care more about struggling workers, and told unions they should do more to fight for racial justice.

“Bill insisted that the labor movement understand that economic and racial justice could not be separated,” said Damon Silvers, the AFL-CIO’s former policy director and now senior adviser.

Spriggs conducted studies about the higher unemployment rate for Black workers and how the failure to raise the federal minimum wage has disproportionally hurt workers of color. “People forget what Black means,” he said in 2020. “It’s a category created to make a set of people who we could legally discriminate against. It’s one of the more disturbing things about the American economy.”

He worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations as well as for Congress’s Joint Economic Committee and was on the staff of nonprofit groups and think tanks, including the National Urban League and the Economic Policy Institute. He also juggled demanding roles as AFL-CIO chief economist and professor at Howard, running from teaching classes to testifying before Congress to speaking to Federal Reserve officials.

“He did all this stuff for his students, while still being the voice of labor unions and workers,” said Omari Swinton, chairman of Howard’s economic department. “He advocated for Black people, and he advocated for those who he thought were not treated fairly, for people who weren’t getting a living wage.”

Spriggs bridged the economic establishment and the world of activism. He once went to Jackson Hole, Wyo., to attend the annual summer gathering of the nation’s central bankers. He later told friends that he talked there with Fed Chair Janet L. Yellen and presidents of regional central banks, and then walked outside to speak with left-of-center Fed Up Campaign activists who were protesting against central bank rate increases, saying higher rates would increase unemployment and hurt workers.

A supporter of full employment, Spriggs frequently opposed the Fed’s efforts to raise interest rates to slow the economy and boost unemployment in order to reduce inflation. “There is no period in which the Fed pursued a deflationary policy in which low-income people won,” Spriggs said. “The median income of Black families falls, and it takes years to come back. Child poverty spikes.”

William Edward Spriggs was born in Washington on April 5, 1955, and grew up mostly in Norfolk. His father was a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black World War II unit, and later became a physics professor at what is now Norfolk State University, a historically Black school. His mother was a schoolteacher.

Spriggs graduated in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Williams College in Massachusetts. He received a doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1984; a fellow graduate student, Lawrence Mishel, said Spriggs was the only African American among roughly 150 graduate students in economics at the time.

Spriggs did an unusual amount of fieldwork for his dissertation on the accumulation of wealth by African Americans in Virginia between 1900 and 1914. He visited courthouses across the state to track down land and family records. Early in his career, he taught economics at the historically Black institution North Carolina A&T State University and at Norfolk State.

In 1985, he married Jennifer Dover. Survivors include his wife and a son, William T. Spriggs, both of Great Falls, Va.; and two sisters.

Spriggs took a hiatus from academia to work for the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington-based progressive think tank, from 1990 to 1993. Over the next decade, he also was in and out of government posts, including at the Commerce Department and the Small Business Administration.

He once said his most treasured possession comes from that period: a letter from Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., thanking him for working on the minimum wage increase in 1995, with Kennedy’s signature on the copy of the Senate roll call vote.

From 1998 to 2004, he was executive director of the National Urban League’s Institute for Opportunity and Equality. In 2005, he became chairman of Howard’s economics department and, from 2009 to 2012, he served as assistant secretary of labor for policy under President Barack Obama. He then returned to Howard.

As a mentor, especially to Black men and women, Spriggs often gave inspirational talks about the influence economics can have to change the world. Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy, said she was thinking of dropping out of economics graduate school but changed her mind because Spriggs inspired her when they worked together at the National Urban League.

“For Bill, as accomplished as he was, it was never about his own accomplishments. It was always about preparing the next generation to carry things forward,” Wilson said. “When I worked with him, he used to tell me that I was his retirement policy. By that, he meant that he could go into retirement and not worry about what was happening in the field of economics and the fight for racial and economic justice because he would be comfortable knowing there will be others to carry on his work.”