No noteworthy results appear from the statistics of marital condition among the negroes. They correspond closely with the statistics for southern whites, the main differences being that the race has a very much larger proportion of widowed and divorced persons and that in the last ten years there has been a decline in the proportion of adult negroes who were married, while among southern whites there has been an increase in the proportion who were married. Both races show a decided increase in early marriages, this being true for the country as a whole and probably the result of the high prosperity which prevailed immediately before 1900.
Perhaps the most important suggestions derived from the analysis of the figures for the Twelfth Census are found in the statistics of occupations. The detailed results of these must be regarded as open to some question since the classification of occupations is perhaps as difficult a problem as any with which the Census Bureau has to grapple, and it is possible that the figures for 1890 and 1900 may not in all cases be strictly comparable. Still certain salient results appear to be established.
Among all the negroes at least ten years of age about five-eighths, 62.2 per cent., are engaged in money getting or gainful occupations. The corresponding proportion among southern whites is less than one-half (46.9 per cent.). The difference between the two races is almost entirely explained by the greater prevalence of money-getting occupations among female negroes, 41.3 per cent. of the negro females and only 11.8 per cent. of the southern white females reporting a gainful occupation. This fact accounts for about three-fourths of the entire difference between the negroes and the southern whites. An explanation of the remaining fourth is found in the fact that negro boys go to work earlier and negro men retire later than white men. In general it may be said that the lower the earning capacity of a productive class the greater the quantity of labor required for its support; the greater the prevalence, therefore, of female labor, of child labor and of the labor of old men. Part of this greater prevalence of child labor and old man labor is due to the fact that the negroes are predominantly engaged in agriculture and that this industry affords greater opportunities than most others for the work of children and old men. Yet this fact only partly accounts for the difference.
The most important specific occupations for the negroes are those of agricultural laborers, farmers, planters and overseers, and laborers not specified. These three classes are probably more numerous than the total number of persons engaged in agriculture, for the number of laborers not specified who were engaged in other occupations than agriculture is probably greater than the number of persons engaged in agriculture and not enrolled in any one of these three occupations. The total number of southern negroes, with the few Indians and Mongolians engaged in this line of industry, increased between 1890 and 1900 by 30.4 per cent., the southern whites in the same occupations increasing in the same period by 43.5 per cent. As a result the non-Caucasians constituted in 1890 44.4 per cent. of the population in these classes, while in 1900 they constituted 42.0 per cent. These three classes together include two-thirds of all the negro breadwinners. In a number of specific occupations involving some degree of skill, the non-Caucasians in the South constituted a somewhat smaller proportion of the total number of laborers in the South in 1900 than they did in 1890. This statement holds true for launderers and laundresses, carpenters, barbers, tobacco and cigar factory operatives, and engineers and firemen (not locomotive). In some other leading occupations the negroes were more numerously represented in 1900 than in 1890. These include in the professional classes, teachers and clergymen, and in the skilled labor classes, miners and quarrymen and iron and steel workers.
While the future of the negro race in the United States seems to be essentially an industrial and economic question, turning upon their efficiency in comparison with classes of the population who compete with them in their staple occupations, the net results of these various and complex industrial changes can perhaps best be measured by the vital statistics of the race. The Census Bureau has no direct information regarding births or marriages. Its information regarding deaths is confined to the negro population living in the registration area and amounting to between one-seventh and one-eighth (13.4 per cent.) of the entire negro population of the country, over 93 per cent. of it living in cities. The death-rate of negroes in the registration area in 1900 was reported as 30.2 per thousand, that of the whites in the same area being 17.3. But of the negroes in this area the majority were female and the female is the healthier sex. They were also predominantly adult and the adult years are the healthier ages. To allow for these differences a computation has been made to ascertain what the death-rate for the negroes for the whole country would be, if the death-rate observed in the registration area for each sex and each age had been true of the negroes of that sex and age in the country as a whole. On this basis the estimated negro death-rate of the United States as a whole is 34.2 instead of 30.2, or just about double that of the whites.
In 1890 the death-rate of the negroes in the registration area as distinguished from the Indians and Mongolians was not computed. That of the three races combined, nineteen-twentieths being negroes, was in 1890 29.9, and in 1900,29.6 per thousand, a decrease of three deaths per 10,000. In the same area the death-rate of whites in 1890 was 19.1 and in 1900, 17.3, a decrease of 18 per 10,000. It is uncertain how far these figures may be accepted as indicative of the actual changes. They are submitted not as entirely trustworthy, but as the best information available.
Indirect evidence of the birth-rate among the negroes may be obtained by computing the number of children under five years of age to each 1,000 women fifteen to forty-four. These computations show a very marked decline between 1880 and 1900 in the proportion of negro children, but show that the proportion of children at the present time is greater for negroes than for whites.
But when the country is considered in sections separating the population of the South from that of the North, different results appear. Negroes, as a whole, have a larger proportion of living children than whites, but paradoxical as it may seem, it is also true that southern negroes have at present a smaller proportion of living children than southern whites, and northern negroes have a smaller proportion of living children than northern whites. The difference in the proportion of children stated in the preceding paragraph, in other words, is fundamentally a geographical or sectional difference and not a racial one. Negroes have a high proportion of children not because they are negroes, but because nine-tenths of them live in the South and show the effect of influences which establish a high birth-rate there. The South at the present time is increasing in population faster than the North, with all its immigration, largely because 1,000 white women at the North, fifteen to forty-four years of age, could show at the census only 470 children under five years of age, while at the South 1,000 negro women of those ages could show 621 children, and 1,000 white women 633 children. In the southern States prior to the Civil War the proportion of children under five years of age to 1,000 women of child-bearing ages was about the same for the two races. The immediate result of the Civil War, emancipation and reconstruction, was to decrease slightly the number of white women and increase the number of negro children, so that in 1880 for 1,000 women of the specified race and of child-bearing age, there were in the South 82 more negro than white children. In 1890 the difference in favor of the negro race had sunk to 17, and in 1900 it had disappeared and been replaced by an excess of 12 white children.
The American negro, after the turmoil of Civil War and reconstruction, found himself thrown on his own resources as he had never been before. This occurred at the beginning of a period of rapid, almost revolutionary, industrial change in the South, a change which did not at first affect seriously the staple crops upon which most of the negro’s labor as a slave had been spent, but which apparently is beginning to affect even those. In seeking other avenues of self-support than agriculture and domestic service, he is seriously handicapped by unfamiliarity with such work, a lack of native aptitude for it, so it is alleged, absence of the capital often requisite, and a preference on the part of most of the whites, even when other things are equal, as they seldom are, to employ members of their own race. In the industrial competition thus begun the negro seems during the last decade to have slightly lost ground in most of those higher occupations in which the services are rendered largely to whites. He has gained in the two so-called learned professions of teachers and clergymen. He has gained in the two skilled occupations of miner or quarryman and iron or steel worker. He has gained in the occupations, somewhat ill-defined so far as the degree of skill required is indicated, of sawing or planing, mill employee, and nurse or midwife. He has gained in the class of servants and waiters. On the other side of the balance sheet he has lost ground in the South as a whole in the following skilled occupations: carpenter, barber, tobacco and cigar factory operative, fisherman, engineer or fireman (not locomotive) and probably blacksmith. He has lost ground also in the following industries in which the degree of skill implied seems somewhat uncertain: laundry work, hackman or teamster, steam railroad employee, housekeeper or steward. The balance seems not favorable. It suggests that in the competition with white labor to which the negro is being subjected he has not quite held his own.