“Race Suicide” Among Negroes
From inquiries that I have made everywhere in the North there would seem, indeed, to be a tendency to “race suicide” among Negroes as among the old American white stock. Especially is this true among the better class Negroes. The ignorant Negro in Southern agricultural districts is exceedingly prolific, but his Northern city brother has comparatively few children. I have saved the record from personal inquiry of perhaps two hundred Northern Negro families of the better class. Many have no children at all, many have one or two, and the largest family I found (in Boston) was seven children. I found one Negro family in the South with twenty-one children! Industrialism, of course, is not favourable to a large birth-rate. All Northern cities show a notable surplus, according to the statistics, of Negro women over Negro men. Many of these are house servants and, like the large class of roving single men who do day labour on the streets and railroads, they are without family ties and have no children.
Dr. Furniss finds that the deaths of Negroes from tuberculosis constitute over half the total deaths from that cause in the city of Indianapolis, whereas, in proportion to Negro population, they should constitute only one-eighth.
His observations upon these startling facts are of great interest:
“I believe the reason for these conditions is plain. First of all it is due to Negroes leaving the country and crowding into the larger cities, especially in the North, where they live in a climate totally different from that with which they have been familiar. They occupy unsanitary homes; they are frequently compelled to labour with insufficient food and clothing and without proper rest. Of necessity they follow the hardest and most exposed occupations in order to make a livelihood. I regret to say that intemperance and immorality play a part in making these figures what they are. They easily fall victim to the unusual vices of the city.
“Another reason for increased mortality is improper medical attention. Not only among the ignorant but among the intelligent we find too much trust put in patent medicines; the belief, latent it is true in many cases, but still existing among the ignorant, in the hoodoo militates against the close following of the doctor’s orders.
“What shall we do about it?” asks Dr. Furniss. “We must urge those around us to more personal cleanliness, insist on a pure home life, and less dissipation and intemperance: to have fewer picnics and save more money for a rainy day. Tell the young people in the South not to come to Northern cities, but to go to the smaller towns of the West, where they can have a fair chance. Unless something is done to change existing conditions, to stop this movement to our Northern cities, to provide proper habitations and surroundings for those who are already here, it will be only a question of time until the problem of the American Negro will reach a solution not at all desirable from our point of view.”
Of course a doctor always sees the pathological side of life and his view is likely to be pessimistic. I saw much of the tragedy of the slum Negroes in the cities of the North, and yet many Negroes have been able to survive, many have learned how to live in towns and are making a success of their lives—as I shall show more particularly in the next chapter. It must not be forgotten that Negro families in Boston and Philadelphia (mostly mulattoes, it is true) as well as in Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, have lived and thrived under city conditions for many generations. Not a few Negroes in Indianapolis whose homes I visited are housed better than the average of white families.
Sickness Among Northern Negroes
Not only is the death-rate high in the North, but the Negro is hampered by sickness to a much greater degree than white people. Hospital records in Philadelphia show an excess of Negro patients over whites, according to population, of 125 per cent. About 5,000 Negroes passed through the hospitals of Philadelphia last year, averaging a confinement of three weeks each. Mr. Warner, in American Charities, makes sickness the chief cause of poverty among coloured people in New York, Boston, New Haven, and Baltimore. The percentage of sickness was twice or more as high as that of Germans, Irish, or white Americans.