Part 2

While the future of the negro race in the United States seems to be essentially an industrial and economic question, turning upon their efficiency in comparison with classes of the population who compete with them in their staple occupations, the net results of these various and complex industrial changes can perhaps best be measured by the _vital statistics_ of the race. The Census Bureau has no direct information regarding births or marriages. Its information regarding deaths is confined to the negro population living in the registration area and amounting to between one-seventh and one-eighth (13.4 per cent.) of the entire negro population of the country, over 93 per cent. of it living in cities. The death-rate of negroes in the registration area in 1900 was reported as 30.2 per thousand, that of the whites in the same area being 17.3. But of the negroes in this area the majority were female and the female is the healthier sex. They were also predominantly adult and the adult years are the healthier ages. To allow for these differences a computation has been made to ascertain what the death-rate for the negroes for the whole country would be, if the death-rate observed in the registration area for each sex and each age had been true of the negroes of that sex and age in the country as a whole. On this basis the estimated negro death-rate of the United States as a whole is 34.2 instead of 30.2, or just about double that of the whites.

In 1890 the death-rate of the negroes in the registration area as distinguished from the Indians and Mongolians was not computed. That of the three races combined, nineteen-twentieths being negroes, was in 1890 29.9, and in 1900,29.6 per thousand, a decrease of three deaths per 10,000. In the same area the death-rate of whites in 1890 was 19.1 and in 1900, 17.3, a decrease of 18 per 10,000. It is uncertain how far these figures may be accepted as indicative of the actual changes. They are submitted not as entirely trustworthy, but as the best information available.

Indirect evidence of the birth-rate among the negroes may be obtained by computing the number of children under five years of age to each 1,000 women fifteen to forty-four. These computations show a very marked decline between 1880 and 1900 in the proportion of negro children, but show that the proportion of children at the present time is greater for negroes than for whites.

But when the country is considered in sections separating the population of the South from that of the North, different results appear. Negroes, as a whole, have a larger proportion of living children than whites, but paradoxical as it may seem, it is also true that southern negroes have at present a smaller proportion of living children than southern whites, and northern negroes have a smaller proportion of living children than northern whites. The difference in the proportion of children stated in the preceding paragraph, in other words, is fundamentally a geographical or sectional difference and not a racial one. Negroes have a high proportion of children not because they are negroes, but because nine-tenths of them live in the South and show the effect of influences which establish a high birth-rate there. The South at the present time is increasing in population faster than the North, with all its immigration, largely because 1,000 white women at the North, fifteen to forty-four years of age, could show at the census only 470 children under five years of age, while at the South 1,000 negro women of those ages could show 621 children, and 1,000 white women 633 children. In the southern States prior to the Civil War the proportion of children under five years of age to 1,000 women of child-bearing ages was about the same for the two races. The immediate result of the Civil War, emancipation and reconstruction, was to decrease slightly the number of white women and increase the number of negro children, so that in 1880 for 1,000 women of the specified race and of child-bearing age, there were in the South 82 more negro than white children. In 1890 the difference in favor of the negro race had sunk to 17, and in 1900 it had disappeared and been replaced by an excess of 12 white children.

* * * * *

The American negro, after the turmoil of Civil War and reconstruction, found himself thrown on his own resources as he had never been before. This occurred at the beginning of a period of rapid, almost revolutionary, industrial change in the South, a change which did not at first affect seriously the staple crops upon which most of the negro’s labor as a slave had been spent, but which apparently is beginning to affect even those. In seeking other avenues of self-support than agriculture and domestic service, he is seriously handicapped by unfamiliarity with such work, a lack of native aptitude for it, so it is alleged, absence of the capital often requisite, and a preference on the part of most of the whites, even when other things are equal, as they seldom are, to employ members of their own race. In the industrial competition thus begun the negro seems during the last decade to have slightly lost ground in most of those higher occupations in which the services are rendered largely to whites. He has gained in the two so-called learned professions of teachers and clergymen. He has gained in the two skilled occupations of miner or quarryman and iron or steel worker. He has gained in the occupations, somewhat ill-defined so far as the degree of skill required is indicated, of sawing or planing, mill employee, and nurse or midwife. He has gained in the class of servants and waiters. On the other side of the balance sheet he has lost ground in the South as a whole in the following skilled occupations: carpenter, barber, tobacco and cigar factory operative, fisherman, engineer or fireman (not locomotive) and probably blacksmith. He has lost ground also in the following industries in which the degree of skill implied seems somewhat uncertain: laundry work, hackman or teamster, steam railroad employee, housekeeper or steward. The balance seems not favorable. It suggests that in the competition with white labor to which the negro is being subjected he has not quite held his own.

These figures of occupations seem to me to furnish the best statistical clue yet obtained for an understanding of the industrial and social changes affecting this question in the South. My interpretation of their meaning might be objected to on the ground that when the negroes are increasing more slowly than the whites, as they are at present in the South, it should not be expected that they would increase as fast as whites in the skilled occupations. This objection seems to me to invert the true order of causation, to put the cart before the horse. Should we not rather say that southern negroes are increasing at the present time only two-thirds as fast as southern whites, while from 1800 to 1840 they increased faster and from 1840 to 1880 nearly as fast, because they are not succeeding in entering new occupations or prospering as well in their old as the competing race is doing?

If this view of the process is correct, then one may add in closing that, as these occupation figures throw much light upon the causes, so the figures of an almost stationary death-rate for negroes compared with a rapidly decreasing death-rate for whites, and an apparently declining birth-rate for negroes compared with an actually increasing birth-rate for southern whites, are the best statistical keys to its effects.

WALTER F. WILLCOX. Cornell University.

FOOTNOTE:

[Footnote 1: See especially Census Bulletin 8 entitled “Negroes in the United States,” Washington, 1904.]

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.