Comment on Negro Vital Statistics.
The foregoing facts are very startling and should arouse every intelligent Negro and every friend to the race, to devise a way by which this awful wave of death shall be checked. The history of all civilizations presents seeming unaccountable vital statistics. All races passing into civilization have increase in both birth and death rates. But the case of the Negro in the United States is one deserving profound study. It presents many seeming contrarieties, hardly met elsewhere. The question naturally arises, What shall be done to check this harvest of death? Begin in the school room. Teach the children sound sanitary principles. Begin in the pulpit. Let the minister constantly call attention to this matter and advise a way out of it. Begin the work in all the societies of the race. Establish and maintain schools for nurses and to teach the general principles of housekeeping. The demand is great for competent colored male and female physicians—especially female, as the work must be largely among the women of the race. An organization for the promotion of the sanitary condition of the Negro should be started, and its work vigorously prosecuted. They must be induced to seek better houses, better clothing, better food, and have better care of their bodies. I have known men who would get up every rainy night in the year, and pull their beds from under a leak in the roof, or who would lay abed and the wife set pans and buckets on them to catch the water, rather than bestir themselves two hours in patching the roof. Then I have seen some handsome looking women, most handsomely attired in beautiful white dresses or costly cloaks, hats and feathers, and I have often wondered where they would find a decent place in their homes for those articles when they returned from their perambulations or from the church or party. The old root doctor must be driven out by the lash of the law.
The idea, advanced by some writers, of shutting the Negro up in the lower valley of the Mississippi, or his natural tendency in that direction, is narrow and illogical. Why should the Negro huddle there? I confess that a large per cent. may forever remain there, but there is no natural or legal reason for assigning the Negro any particular locality in this cosmopolitan Republic. Driving him to the unhealthful localities of certain cities is the cause of much of this unnatural death rate. God has made man to inhabit any part of this great globe, and there is no part of it in which any race can not live, though it may require generations for adaptation and acclimatement. For monetary reasons I would be glad if the Negro would not only own that whole region, but monopolize its staple production, as I have before said. But at present there is not the slightest drift in that direction.