Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 78

35. John Roach Straton, “Will Education Solve the Race Problem?” North American Review 170 (June 1900): 785-801.

Pessimistic assessment of the capacity of African Americans to benefit from education. The author blames an increase in criminal behavior, especially rape, and the concomitant increase in lynchings on emancipation. Whether education can counter the reversion to savagism unleashed by emancipation is doubtful for a people that he characterizes as “simple-minded, impressionable, and imitative.” (The collection has two copies of Booker T. Washington’s response to this essay in volumes 30 [no. 3] and 49 [14].)