Looking for criminal statistics first, we find them difficult to obtain in New York. The courts' reports do not classify by color, but we can learn something from the census enumeration of 1904 of the prisoners in the New York County Penitentiary and the New York County Workhouse. These are short term offenders sent up from the city of New York. The enumeration is as follows:
| Total | Males | Females | Per cent Total | Per cent Females | |
| White | 582 | 533 | 49 | 91.8 | 8.4 |
| Colored | 52 | 33 | 19 | 8.2 | 36.5 |
| New York County Workhouse | |||||
| White | 1126 | 870 | 256 | 96.5 | 22.7 |
| Colored | 41 | 12 | 29 | 3.5 | 70.7 |
In view of the proportion of Negroes to whites in Manhattan, two per cent, we find the percentage of colored prisoners high, but no higher than we expect when we remember that the Negro occupies the lowest plane in the industrial community, "the plane which everywhere supplies the jail, the penitentiary, the gallows."[1] But the very large percentage of crime among colored women calls for grave consideration. In the workhouse, imprisoned for fighting, for drunkenness, for prostitution, the colored women more than double in number the colored men. Here is a condition that we noted in the Children's Court records: an unduly large percentage of disorderly and depraved colored female offenders.
We have already touched upon the subject of morality among colored women. Various causes, some of which we have noted, go to the making up of this high percentage of crime. The Negroes themselves believe the basic cause to be their recent enslavement with its attendant unstable marriage and parental status. They point to the centuries of healthful home relationships among Americans and Europeans, and contrast them with the thousands upon thousands of yearly sales of slaves that but two generations ago disrupted the Negro's attempts at family life. With this heritage they believe that it is inevitable that numbers of their women should be slow to recognize the sanctity of home and the importance of feminine virtue.
The mortality figures for the New York Negro are more striking than the figures for crime. In 1908 the death rate for whites in the city was 16.6 in every thousand; for colored (including Chinese), 28.9, almost double the white rate. The Negroes' greatest excess over the white was in tuberculosis, congenital debility, and venereal diseases as the table on the following page shows.
The Negro's inherent weakness, his inability to resist disease, is a favorite topic today with writers on the color question. A high mortality is indeed a matter for grave concern, but we may question whether these figures show inherent weakness. If a new disease attacks any group of people, it causes terrible decimation, and tuberculosis and venereal diseases, the white man's plagues, have proved terribly destructive to the black man. But recalling the conditions under which the great majority of the colored race lives in New York, the long hours of labor, the crowded rooms, the insufficient food, we find abundant cause for a high death rate. For poverty and death go hand in hand, and the proportion of Negroes in New York who, live in great poverty far exceeds the proportion of whites.[2]
| New York, 1908. | White. | Colored. |
| Number of deaths from all causes per 1000 population | 16.6 | 28.9 |
| Number of deaths per 1000 deaths: | ||
| Tuberculosis | 136.0 | 232.8 |
| Pneumonia | 126.0 | 136.3 |
| Diarrhœa and enteritis | 91.8 | 79.0 |
| Bright's disease | 78.3 | 56.5 |
| Heart disease | 76.7 | 83.4 |
| Cancer | 45.5 | 24.8 |
| Congenital debility | 24.5 | 34.1 |
| Diphtheria and croup | 23.7 | 15.0 |
| Scarlet fever | 19.0 | 3.2 |
| Typhoid | 7.3 | 6.9 |
| Venereal diseases | 4.0 | 13.4 |
| All others | 367.2 | 314.6 |
| 1000.0 | 1000.0 |
The students at Hampton Institute sing an old plantation song that runs like this:
"If religion was a thing that money could buy,
The rich would live and the poor would die.
But my good Lord has fixed it so
The rich and the poor together must go."