The causes of excessive mortality among the colored people in Southern cities are said to be many and have been discussed from just as many points of view by students of the social status of this people.
But after several years of professional service among these colored people, which service gave me an opportunity to more closely study them, their faults, habits, needs, methods of living and their knowledge of hygiene and its laws, I have calmly reached the conclusion that the want of money is the main cause of the excessive mortality of this people. It is true that there are several minor causes, but all have their origin in the one mentioned.
Among the most prominent of these minor causes may be mentioned Ignorance and Poverty. Let us briefly consider the first of these.
The colored people have made wonderful progress in the acquirement of knowledge since emancipation, and this improvement has played no small part in reducing their excessive death-rate. Yet from this height we look down and see the great masses of these people still held in the death-like grip of ignorance. To these, education has taken no knowledge of clean homes, pure air, ventilation, soap and water and other things conducive to good health. These are they who to-day are falling so rapidly before the great reaper, death.
It is a truth known to the profession, health departments and students of this subject that most of the deaths of the great human family occur between birth and the ages of five years. The children of the colored race are not an exception to the above statement.
If the children of the intelligent, good, better and best die fast, it stands to reason that those of the ignorant, bad and poor would die even faster, and this is just what I have found to be the case.
Ofttimes, among the lowly masses, ignorance is the first to take charge of the babies at birth; it sticks a slice of fat meat in their innocent little mouths immediately after birth; it rocks the cradle; it fills their little stomachs with all kinds of decoctions, of teas and whiskies to bring out the "hives;" yea, ignorance feeds these little ones on all kinds of solid foods before they are able to digest them, until it finally feeds the grave with the bodies of its little victims.
Even when manhood and womanhood are reached, ignorance, ghost-like, stands forbidding the ventilation and cleaning of homes; it says: "It's too cold to bathe;" it sends men and women to bed in wet and damp clothes and does many other acts that multiply the graves in the old church-yard on the hill.
We come now to consider poverty. Oh, what an enemy it is, and has been, to the human family! It makes its home mostly among the ignorant, and especially among the masses. In the cities of the South the great masses are colored people. Hence it is among these that poverty sits enthroned—a sceptered king ruling amid disease and death. It retards the masses of the race in their march to the city of improvement; it prevents them from having larger and cleaner and better homes; with its bony fingers it points them to the cheap renting huts in alleys, dens, dives and basements of cities, and commands them to enter and die; it follows them into the market places and fills their baskets with cheap adulterated and semi-decayed food-stuffs; aided by prejudice and man's inhumanity to man, it drives the colored people from the healthy country districts into the crowded, sickly settlements of the Southern cities, where they soon sicken and die.