The vital statistics take on additional meaning when they are translated in terms of human beings. In the five years 1956 through 1960, white mothers in Mississippi gave birth to 1634 illegitimate children. In the same period, Negro mothers gave birth to 38,051 illegitimate children.
Substantially the same picture may be seen in the records of Virginia. Between 1938 and 1958, the white illegitimacy rate in Virginia declined slightly, from 2.6 to 2.3 per cent. In this same period, which witnessed astonishing gains in Negro education, Negro housing, Negro income, and Negro job opportunities, the rate of Negro illegitimacy increased from 19.5 per cent to 22.9 per cent.
The records of five Virginia cities and five Virginia counties of substantial Negro population are entirely typical:
| Illegitimate Births as a Percentage of Total Negro Births | |||||
| Cities | |||||
| Richmond | Norfolk | Roanoke | Danville | Lynchburg | |
| 1935-39 | 27.2 | 24.6 | 25.1 | 26.6 | 29.5 |
| 1955-58 | 30.3 | 22.0 | 26.6 | 29.0 | 28.1 |
| Counties | |||||
| Prince | Pittsyl- | Charles | |||
| Halifax | Edward | vania | City | Greensville | |
| 1935-39 | 12.4 | 14.5 | 12.8 | 14.3 | 14.2 |
| 1955-58 | 19.9 | 21.5 | 18.6 | 23.4 | 22.0 |
The U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare periodically releases data on the nation as a whole. The figures for 1957 illustrate the story. In that year, 1.9 per cent of all white births were illegitimate; 21.7 per cent of all Negro births were illegitimate. Negro illegitimacy ran as high as 27.9 per cent in St. Louis, 29.3 per cent in Atlanta, and 34.6 per cent in Knoxville. The influx of Negroes into Washington, D. C., has given the nation’s capital, to the nation’s shame, what the Washington Post has termed “undisputed first place in illegitimacy.” In 1957, nearly 19 per cent of all births recorded in the District of Columbia were illegitimate—5.8 per cent of the whites and 26.5 per cent of the Negroes.
Now, a widespread custom among Negro apologists is to scoff these figures away. It is said, for one thing, that there is “a relatively greater understatement of illegitimacy in the white group than in the nonwhite.” For my own part, I doubt this exceedingly. It is said, also, that a greater percentage of extramarital pregnancies are aborted among white girls than among Negro girls. Perhaps. A third line of rationalization typically has been advanced by the Norfolk Journal and Guide, a Negro newspaper; this has to do with the fact that slaves were not permitted to marry prior to 1865, though they were encouraged to cohabit, and “it is foolish to suppose that a suppressed and constantly vilified minority group could wholly recover from the practice in a few generations.” A related argument, if it is an argument at all, is that in pre-War times “many white slave-owners promiscuously exploited their slave women sexually.” Other rationalizations put some of the blame for Negro sexual looseness on housing, economic opportunity, low income levels, and the like. Generally, it is all charged to the “system of segregation,” a charge that tends to collapse when it is observed that the high rates of Negro illegitimacy recorded in the South are not materially different in the integrated climes of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, and West Virginia.
But the basic validity of the statistics is not entirely discounted, even by Negro commentators. Carl Rowan, the Minneapolis newspaperman who came to the State Department with the New Frontier, faced up to them (after a good deal of preliminary squirming) in Harper’s in 1961. A leading Negro educator, President Thomas H. Henderson of Virginia Union University, offered some thoughtful comments in a paper delivered before the Virginia Conference of Social Work in 1957. He said:
“Let me begin by saying what the problem of a high illegitimacy rate among Negroes is not. It is not, first of all, a statistical illusion.... [T]he illegitimacy rate for Virginia Negroes has been ten times as high as that for whites each year for several decades. After subducting the maximum influence of all possible sources of error in the statistics, the consistency and magnitude of the differential leaves no doubt that a real and disturbing difference exists.”
The problem cannot be blamed, said Dr. Henderson, on any particular desire to obtain public benefits under the program of Aid to Dependent Children. Moreover, “it is not to any great degree a problem of racial interbreeding—every indication points to a steady decrease in interbreeding since before the dawn of this century.” The problem is “overwhelmingly a problem of illegitimacy with both parents colored.” He added:
“The problem is not the result of innate differences between the races. It would be less painful if it were. If the Negro had innate moral weakness or blindness, if he had an innately inferior intelligence, or in some inborn way either his sex drive or his fertility were somehow different, we could shrug off the problem by saying, ‘God made it that way; there’s nothing to do about it.’ But we are faced with the hard fact that reputable scientists regard as fruitless all efforts to find valid evidence of any innate moral weakness of the Negro or any innate difference in personality, intelligence, or sexual behavior.”