the whites in the registration area between 1910 and 1920 was 17.7 percent, that for Negroes 23.9 percent. The Negro death-rate now is no higher than was that of the whites in 1890. For example, the white death-rate in New York City in 1890 was 28.5 per thousand. The Negro death-rate of that city in 1921 was only 17.9 per thousand. In the same city in 1919 the Negro infant mortality was 151 per thousand births, which was less than the white infant mortality in 1890 in New Orleans, Charleston, or Richmond. Among the Negroes insured in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the deaths from tuberculosis have fallen forty-two percent since 1911.11

A general decline in the death-rate of the Negro for every age period is indicated in the statistics of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company covering 1,500,000 of its policy holders for the past decade. Commenting upon these figures, Woofter says: "Among the very young children the death-rate has dropped more than one-half. Tuberculosis mortality has decreased from 418 per 100,000 to 244, or 42 percent. Deaths from typhoid and malaria, which especially affect the rural districts, declined 75 per cent. In spite of the influenza epidemics, deaths from pneumonia have declined 26 per cent. Improvement along so many and diverse lines is most hopeful and indicates beyond a shadow of a doubt that the colored people have awakened to the importance of the health problem in their affairs." 12

But, in spite of the gratifying showing of these figures, the death rate of the Negro is still dangerously high. According to the statistics of 1920, in eleven states which keep separate records, the adjusted rate of mortality from tuberculosis is three times as great for the Negroes as for the whites. About the same ratio holds for the respiratory diseases, according to the reports of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. At present the Negro death-rate is 18.4 compared to 12.8 for the whites.

The high mortality of the Negro is a great handicap in his struggle for existence. The larger proportion of Negroes who die before reaching the age of self-maintenance represents an immense economic loss to the race. For example, in a million of Negroes born in Washington City only 499,169 survive to the age of five as compared to 739.661 whites surviving to that age-a difference of 240,492 lives. An economic waste of such magnitude places the Negro at a great "E. K. Jones, "The Negro's Struggle for Health," Opportunity, June, 1923,

disadvantage in comparison with the Caucasian. And the economic loss to the Negro through illness is even greater than the loss through death. For instance, in the town of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, an investigation by the Missouri Negro Industrial Commission revealed the fact that the wage-working Negroes of the town averaged a loss of sixty-five days-eighteen percent of the year-due to illness. The Negro Year Book estimates that 450,000 Negroes are seriously ill at any one time, and that the annual loss to the race in earnings through sickness and death is $300,000,000.

The most discouraging aspect of the Negro's future, however, is not his high death-rate but the rapid falling off in his birth-rate. For instance, in the last decade, 1910-20, his birth-rate declined seventeen percent as compared to a decline of only 2.5 percent for the whites. As the Negroes change from rural to city life their birth-rate falls faster than that of the whites who undergo the same change.13

The death-rate of the Negro already exceeds the birth-rate in most of the states outside of the South. Only in the Black Belt of the South does the Negro show an encouraging excess of births over deaths. In the Piedmont region of the South, where industrial life is complex and strenuous and fast approaching conditions which obtain in the North and West, the Negro death-rate more nearly equals his birth-rate.

If the decline in the birth-rate of the Negro is due in any large measure to vice and disease, and not to prudential considerations, there is a strong probability that it will continue to fall until it sinks below the death-rate.

Raymond Pearl, in discussing the vital index of the Negro (the vital index being the ratio of 100 births divided by the deaths), says that "except in the rural districts of the southern states, practically never does the vital index of the Negro population rise to a value of as much as 100. But plainly any population with a vital index under 100 is a dying population. . . .

"Under conditions as they are, Nature, by the slow but dreadfully sure processes of biological evolution is apparently solving the Negro problem in the United States in a manner which, when finished, will be like all Nature's solutions, final, complete, and absolutely definite. Just in proportion as the Negro becomes anything but an agricultural laborer in the southern states does he hasten the time of his final extinction in this country."

13 "Negro Population in the U. S. 1790-1915," Census Report, p. 290.

14

Quoted by Holmes, Studies in Evolution and Eugenics. D. 253.

But, whatever inferences may be drawn from statistics, there is one consideration which weighs against the possible extinction of the Negro in the United States, and it is that what we call Negro mortality statistics include data derived from a wide variation of ethnic elements. About twenty percent of our so-called Negroes are people with varying degrees of Caucasian blood and Caucasian traits, and among the Negroes of pure African strain at least five percent have been blended with various African stocks such as the Semitic, Libyan, and Galla, whose traits differ widely from those of the West African, who constituted the bulk of our slave population.

If, therefore, we take the most pessimistic view possible of the Negro's vitality statistics and assume that the bulk of the race in the United States possesses inherited traits which unfit them for survival in our highly complex environment, we have to remember that twentyfive percent of our Negro population is made up of ethnic elements which retain very slight traces of the West African stock.

Is it not reasonable to suppose that at least this twenty-five percent will be able to adapt itself to the conditions of existence in the United States?

CHAPTER 67

ECONOMIC CHANCES OF SURVIVAL

Probability of the Survival of the Negro from the Standpoint of His Economic Status His Apparent Failure to Advance up to 1895-Gloomy Predictions for His Future at That Time-Wonderful Strides After 1895 under the Leadership of Booker Washington-Rise of a Prosperous Negro Middle Class-Problem of the Ability of the Negro to Keep Pace with the EverIncreasing Specialization and Intensification of Industry

I

N the next place, what is the outlook for the survival of the American Negro from the standpoint of his being able to make a living? How is he succeeding in the various occupations in securing the means of subsistence?

Up to about 1895 competent judges doubted whether upon the whole the Negro had made any progress in industrial efficiency. Frederick Hoffman, writing in 1896, made the most pessimistic predictions in regard to the Negro's industrial future. He found that in Mississippi, even where the Negro occupied the more fertile land, the white man produced nearly twice as much cotton to the acre. He found that in Virginia the total product of tobacco and the product per acre fell off in the five counties in which the Negroes were the chief cultivators. "This falling off," he said, "is more the result of diminishing economic efficiency in the Negro in this branch of agriculture than of changes in the productiveness of the soil, or the substitution of other crops.” 1 He found that in South Carolina and Georgia the total product of rice and also the product per acre had fallen off in the rice areas where the Negro was the chief cultivator, and in reference to this he said: "We must attribute a decreasing production more to the growing inefficiency of Negro labor than to other economic causes." He quotes from the Progressive South the statement that: "it is seldom that sufficient ability is found in a Negro to permit him to manage and cultivate even a small farm. When his land is paid for, his labor becomes impaired in its value to the community in which he lives, as he will subsist on next to nothing and work only when necessity compels."

'Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, p. 256. 'Ibid., p. 259.

Ibid., p. 268.

On the basis of such evidence as this, Hoffman was led to believe that: "while the settlement of the Negro on land which is his own may insure a happier and less burdensome existence, it is very doubtful whether such a condition would not, in the end, prove more of a hindrance than a help to the economic progress of the South," and "that, if the present tendency towards a lower degree of economic efficiency is persisted in, the day is not far distant when the Negro laborer of the South will be gradually supplanted by the native laborer."

As for the final outcome, he said: "In the plain language of the facts brought together, the colored race is shown to be on a downward grade, tending towards a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when disease will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths and gradual extinction of the race take place." 5

Professor Shaler of Harvard University, writing just a few years later than Hoffman, remarked that: "Wherever a black man owns a place he neglects it; he is usually content with a dirty shanty, and while he has much natural faculty for the immediate tasks of the farmer, his lack of foresight leads him to wear out his fields. As is well known, the lands of the South have been sorely taxed by bad agriculture, though of late years there has been a very great improvement in this regard. There is evidently reason to fear further depredations from an extended possession of the soil by the Negroes. Here we shall have to trust to the imitative motive of the race, and to the training of a minority of them in the art of farming, with the hope that the contagion of example may help the conditions."

Alfred H. Stone, a Mississippi planter, using data of the years 1898-1905, showed that the Italian cotton growers in Chicot County, Arkansas, produced 120.1 percent more lint cotton per acre than the Negroes.'

Professor Walter F. Willcox, of Cornell University, on the basis of data obtained prior to 1900, pointed out that the cultivation of crops in which the Negro formerly had a monopoly was shifting to other sections of the country where the labor was chiefly or entirely white.

"From all the evidence," he says, "it seems clear that Southern

• Ibid., p. 308.

6 Ibid., p. 312.

• The Neighbor, p. 172.

"Studies in the American Race Problem, p. 183.

Ibid., p. 450.