Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 28

4. Walter F. Willcox, Negro Criminality: An Address Delivered before the American Social Science Association at Saratoga, September 6, 1899 (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1899; preprint). (25 p.)

Study of crime among African Americans by the chief statistician for the census bureau using data from the 1890 census. The term “race friction” is defined, and almost half of the pamphlet is devoted to lynching, which the author believes destroys amicable relations between black and white races in the South. “Lynching is harmful mainly because it prevents the rise of a public opinion based on a careful sifting of the facts. Where practiced under any provocation, however great, by members of one race upon those of another, it fosters the development of separate public opinions one for each race, and hence tends to make co-operation of the two in one government impossible.” This address appears later as a chapter in Mr. Stone and Professor Willcox’s Studies of the American Race Problem. (The collection has another copy of this article in volume 84 [no. 12].)