Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 18

1. William Wilson Elwang, The Negroes of Columbia Missouri: A Concrete Study of the Race Problem. A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate Department of the University of Missouri, in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (Columbia, MO: E. W. Stephens for the Department of Sociology, University of Missouri, 1904). (69 p.)

Study of African Americans in Columbia, Missouri, replete with facts and figures as well as a map tipped in behind the front cover that shows black residences in the city. As far as solving the “race problem” is concerned, the author endorses a segregated society, which includes separate schools for black children and a separate court system for black offenders. The author’s point of view in regard to black suffrage is summarized as follows. “Politically they [African Americans] ought to be frankly disfranchised. They are ‘political idiots,’ and it is sheer madness to permit them to misuse and prostitute a privilege which the Anglo-Saxons won for themselves only through a thousand years of painful history. This would, certainly, work an immediate hardship upon a worthy few, but in a complex race question such as this, the individual can have no rights.” The author also argues that “Religiously they [African Americans] ought to be under the guardian tutorship of the white churches.” He goes on to note that “While we are sending well-educated, trained, and expensively equipped white missionaries to die of fever among the savages of Africa we still find it consonant with duty to turn over the semi-savages at home to the guidance of ignorant, frequently self-conceited and often immoral negro ‘preachers.’ The comparatively few negro clergymen of education and character among them have little if any real influence for good. The mass of their constituents is out of sympathy with their works and hopes.”