Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 94

1. Benjamin G. Humphreys, In Defense of the State of Mississippi against the Charge of Peonage: Speech of Hon. Benjamin G. Humphreys on Mississippi in the House of Representatives, Monday, March 2, 1908 (Washington, DC: n.p., 1908). (15 p.)

Speech explaining the speaker’s reasons for introducing a resolution calling for Immigration Commission to investigate “the treatment and conditions of work of immigrants on the cotton plantations of the Mississippi Delta [in both Mississippi and Arkansas].” The speaker begins with a reference to the Sunnyside Plantation in Arkansas, which hosted a colony of Italian immigrants, and refers to Mr. Stone’s economic study of that plantation’s operations over a six year period. The speaker refers to Mr. Stone as “perhaps the most profound student of the race question in this country to-day” and reads excerpts from his address to the American Society of Economics in 1905. (The collection has another copy of this speech in volume 90 [no. 22].)