CENSUS STATISTICS OF THE NEGRO.

A PAPER BY
WALTER F. WILLCOX.

[From the Yale Review, November, 1904.]

CENSUS STATISTICS OF THE NEGRO.

THERE is no leading country in which the relations of widely different races are so important as in the United States. As a natural result of this, there is no country in which statistical investigation of race questions is so highly developed, or in which the records cover so long a time. In Europe it is not customary to recognize or emphasize the race classification of the population in statistical returns. In India the race classification while recognized is subsidiary to that of religion and of language. In American countries to the south of the United States where race relations are as complex and as diverse as they are with us, the statistical method is imperfectly developed or of recent introduction. The main sources of statistical information, therefore, regarding race relations are the figures for the United States and those for several of the West Indian Islands.

Since the Civil War the statistical study of certain aspects of race questions in the United States has been entered upon by different governmental agencies. The Department of Agriculture has made investigations of the diet and food supply of negroes and of whites with especial reference to the bodily heat and the energy it can produce. The Department of Labor has made a number of suggestive reports upon the condition of negro communities in certain typical localities. Various municipal health reports throw light upon the vital statistics of the two races. The Bureau of Education has gathered much information regarding the educational development of negroes and whites. But no one of these and perhaps not all of them combined have furnished or are furnishing at the present time as much information regarding the statistics of race in the United States as the Census Bureau.[1] It is of the highest importance that the information thus gathered should be carefully and intelligently interpreted and its lessons correctly read. The object of this paper is to state certain conclusions to which I have been brought by my statistical studies of the subject and especially of the recent census figures.

The population of the United States is divided by the census returns into four classes, the native white of native parents, the native white of foreign born parents, that is, the children of immigrants, the immigrant or foreign born white class, and the other races than the white, sometimes called collectively the colored, perhaps more accurately described as the “non-Caucasians.” The most accurate description of them is to enumerate the great races to which they belong, namely, the negro, Indian and Mongolian. Of this fourth group, the non-Caucasians, more than nineteen-twentieths are negroes and therefore when statements are made, as I shall be compelled sometimes to make them, not for the negroes but for the non-Caucasians, it will be understood that nineteen-twentieths of these are negroes and what is true, therefore, of the non-Caucasians is probably true of the negroes. These four classes correspond roughly to four grades of economic well-being,—the native white of native parents at the top, the negroes, Indians, and Mongolians at the bottom. Now it is a general fact that the lower the scale of economic well-being the less accurate on the average will be the answers to questions put them. A measure of this can be derived from the answers to the age question. It can be easily proved that the errors in reporting ages among the immigrant white are about twice as numerous as among the native white and among the non-Caucasians about twice as numerous as among the immigrant white. Where age is stated erroneously it is usually stated at a round number as a multiple of 5. The excess in the reported number at these multiples of 5 over the estimated true number is thus a measure of the accuracy of the figures. This excess in 1900 among persons between twenty-eight and sixty-two years of age inclusive for the native whites was 12.4 per cent. of the total estimated number at multiples of 5, for the foreign born white 29.8, and for the negro 81.2. What is true of the inaccuracies in the field of age statistics is probably true of other sorts of inaccuracies. A larger proportion of the negro population than of the white is homeless and therefore likely to be omitted by enumerators instructed to visit every home in the country. In Maryland a careful recount of nearly 63,000 people was had a few months after the census day in the effort to detect suspected fraud. The recount showed that in the original count the omissions among negroes had been 3.7 per cent. and among whites 1.3 per cent. These omissions were probably greater than in the general population, but it is not unlikely that the per cent. of omissions among negroes is twice as great as the per cent. among whites.

There is no race question upon which we have so great a lack of scientific information at the present time as that of the degree of direct intermixture of the two races. Public opinion at the South seems to be almost unanimous in its belief that, since the Civil War and emancipation, intermixture of the two races has decreased and that the mulatto population at the present time is largely the offspring of mulattoes alone or of mulattoes and negroes, and that there has been relatively little new infusion of white blood. But no statistical basis for this opinion exists, and general observation on a question so difficult and delicate must be regarded as a very slippery foundation for the belief. Questions on this point were introduced into the censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880 and 1890, and the results were tabulated and published for each of these censuses except 1880. Prior to 1890 the question was asked in substantially the same terms, that is, simply the number of mulattoes. In 1890 unfortunately it was sought to amplify the question and Congress required the Census Office to report the number of mulattoes, quadroons and octoroons. Such precision in this field is unobtainable and, in natural reaction against the misleading results obtained in 1890, the Office in 1900 omitted the question entirely. I cannot feel that this was wise. The results obtained in 1850, 1860 and 1870 for the whole United States showed substantial agreement, the per cent. of mulattoes among the total negroes having been reported as in 1850, 11.2; in 1860, 13.2; in 1870, 12.0. These figures cannot be accepted as showing an increase in the proportion of mulattoes down to the Civil War and a slight decrease after that time, much less can the slightly larger proportion of mulattoes reported in 1890 (15.2 per cent.) with a different form of question be regarded as any evidence of an increase of race mixture since emancipation, but the general conclusion that between one-eighth and one-ninth of the negro population at about the time of the Civil War was mulatto may be regarded as probable.

I believe that if the question should be repeated in 1910 in substantially the same terms as those employed in 1850, 1860, 1870 and 1880, the results would be likely to indicate far more accurately than general observation can do whether the proportion of mulattoes among the negroes has increased or decreased since emancipation. To establish this, one need not believe that the reported percentages at former censuses were correct. All that would be necessary for such a result would be that the question put in substantially the same terms at intervals during half a century would secure answers which if not entirely accurate would at least err in the same direction and by about the same amount.

At the present time there are about nine and one-fifth million negroes under the United States flag, including those in Porto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii, as well as the negroes of continental United States. This does not include the negritoes, much less the Malays, of the Philippine Islands. In continental United States, excluding Alaska and our insular accessions, there are about eight and five-sixths million negroes. Nearly nine-tenths of them (89.7 per cent.) live in the southern states, that is, the states south of Mason and Dixon’s line, the Ohio River and the parallel of the southern boundary of Missouri. The per cent. living in the southern states, however, is very slowly decreasing. In 1860, 92.2 per cent. were living there; in 1880, 90.5 per cent.; in 1900, 89.7 per cent., or in other words, in 1860, 78 negroes among each 1,000 in the country were living outside of the South, in 1900, 103 in each 1,000. Apparently there was a considerable change in the distribution of the negroes as a result of the upheaval in the Civil War. Then followed a period of relative quiescence, but in the last decade of the century there was an increase in the northward current of negro migration, especially to northern cities. That the negro population in our large cities is increasing with greater rapidity than the white population appears clearly when the totals of the two races are obtained for the thirty-eight cities which had at least 100,000 inhabitants in 1900. The increase of negroes in these cities, 1890 to 1900, was 38.0 per cent., and that of whites 32.7 per cent., and in the five southern cities of this class, Baltimore, Washington, Louisville, Memphis and New Orleans, the increase of whites was 20.8, and of negroes 25.8 per cent. Washington was the only southern city of this class in which the negro population did not increase, 1890 to 1900, with greater rapidity than the white. This rapid increase of the negro population in the larger cities of the country is the more significant, because thirty-three of these thirty-eight cities lie in the north and west and therefore increase of their negro population usually results from long distance migration, and because also the negro population of smaller cities and of country districts has been increasing as a rule less rapidly than the white population.

There is no traceable tendency to a separation between negroes and whites in the South whereby the negro population is becoming more predominant in the rural districts and the white population in the cities. Perhaps the best evidence on this point is that derived from the 242 cities in the South Atlantic and South Central States, which had at least 2,500 inhabitants both in 1890 and in 1900, and for which, therefore, the race composition of the population was separately returned. The negro population of these 242 places increased between 1890 and 1900 by 21.7 per cent., the white population by 26.5 per cent. The negro population of the rest of the southern States outside these 242 places increased 16.4 per cent., while the white population outside these 242 places increased 25.0 per cent. The figures show the remarkable fact, which so far as I know is unparalleled, that the growth of white population in the South has been almost as rapid in the country districts as in the cities. Whether this means that the white population is betaking itself more to agriculture, it would be difficult to assert from the figures. The negro population is increasing in southern cities about one-third faster than in country districts. Or, the facts may be stated perhaps more intelligibly in this way. In the 242 southern cities for which the race figures are distinguished both for 1890 and for 1900, there were in 1890, 464 negroes to 1,000 whites; in 1900 there were 447, a decrease of 17. Meantime, in the country districts there were in 1890, 522 negroes to 1,000 whites, and in 1900 there were 486, a decrease of 36. These figures show that the decrease in the proportion of negroes relative to whites in the southern States in the last decade has been twice as rapid in the country districts as in the cities.

In studying the increase of the negro population it must be borne in mind that the figures of 1870 are admitted to be seriously inaccurate. There are some reasons also for doubting the accuracy of the census of the negroes in 1890. In order to avoid using these erroneous or questionable figures and also in order to base the computation on long periods of time, the increase has been computed by each of the five twenty-year periods of the nineteenth century. As the negro problem is preëminently one of interest to the South it seems fairer to compare the growth of the two races in that region. Such a comparison shows that the negro population of the South increased most rapidly during the first twenty years of the nineteenth century and that its rate of increase steadily declined to the end of the century. The rate of increase of southern whites was highest not from 1800 to 1820, but 1840 to 1860. Perhaps the results may be stated in a way to make them most easily intelligible by treating the rate of increase of whites in the southern States in the given twenty-year period as 100 and comparing with it the rate of increase of southern negroes during the same period of time. Following this method, the increase of the southern negroes, 1800 to 1820, was to that of southern whites as 125 to 100, that from 1820 to 1840 was 110, that from 1840 to 1860 was 87, that from 1860 to 1880 was 90, and that from 1880 to 1900 was 57. These figures show that since 1840 the increase of southern negroes has been less rapid than that of southern whites, that the increase from 1860 to 1880 was relatively more rapid than in the preceding or the following twenty-year period, suggesting that the period of war and of reconstruction affected the increase of the white race more than that of the negroes. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the southern negroes were increasing much faster than the southern whites. At the end of it they were increasing only about three-fifths as fast.

But to complete the presentation of the results reached by the Census Bureau on this point, it should be added that if the results for the last twenty-year period be analyzed by decades a different conclusion is indicated. Comparison of the rates of growth of southern negroes and southern whites for those two decades shows that the rate of increase for southern negroes, 1880 to 1890, was to that of southern whites as 55 is to 100, while in the decade from 1890 to 1900 it was as 68 to 100. I confess myself skeptical of the accuracy of these figures. It is difficult for me to accept results which show on their face that the rate of increase of southern whites east of the Mississippi River was less, 1890 to 1900, than it was 1880 to 1890, the rate falling from 19.1 to 18.7, while that for southern negroes in the same area was much greater in the second decade, the rate rising from 10.6 to 15.7. At the same time I see nothing better at present than to mark these figures as questionable and to suspend judgment until the results for 1910 are published. It may be that the increase among the negroes has been affected by the marked prosperity of the South in recent years and has been affected more conspicuously than the figures for the whites.

With reference to sex it may be noted that there is an excess of females among the negro population of the United States, while this is not true either of the Indians or of the native whites. Strangely enough, this excess of females is found even at the very earliest ages. It is a general rule that the number of male children born exceeds the number of female. Among 100 children born, on the average about 51 are male and 49 female. The scanty records of births in cities where the negroes constitute a considerable element of the population, show that in this respect the negroes conform to the rule. Yet negro children even at the very earliest ages, as enumerated by the census, show an excess of females over males. This is true of negro children under one month, and of each of the four other subdivisions of age under one year. Indeed it is true for every year of age up to nine. It may be noted that this anomaly appears for the first time in the figures for 1900. Whether it is due to the fact that that census first made the distinction between negro population and the total colored, including the Indians and Mongolians, I am unable to say.

In the city population of the United States as a rule, females outnumber the males. This generalization holds true of the great majority of cities east of the Mississippi River. It is more true of the negroes than it is of the whites. In the southern cities and towns having at least 2,500 inhabitants in 1900, there were 9 more negro females than males in each 100 of negro population. Among children the two sexes were approximately equal in numbers, so that if the figures allowed us to exclude the children the preponderance of females would be still greater. The cause is doubtless to be found in large measure in the greater demand and greater opportunity for female labor in cities.

At the present time rather more than half of the negroes over ten years of age are able to write. The per cent. of illiteracy has decreased rapidly in the last ten years. In 1890 it was 57.1, while in 1900 it was 45.5. This rapid decrease in negro illiteracy has gone on parallel with the rapid decrease of illiteracy among whites. At the present time the negroes as a race show about seven times the proportion of illiterates that the whites do and about four times the proportion of illiterates found among southern whites, and these ratios between the two races have not materially changed since 1890. Illiteracy is much more prevalent in the country districts than it is in the cities. About half of the negroes living outside cities having at least 25,000 inhabitants are illiterate, while in these cities less than one-third are illiterate. The rapid development of the educational system among negroes in the South has left clear traces upon the proportion of illiterates in the several age classes. The highest proportion of illiterates is found among negroes at least sixty-five years of age, the lowest among negroes ten to fourteen years of age. The difference between these two age limits is rather greater than the difference between city and country negroes, the illiteracy of all negroes over sixty-five being rather greater than that of negroes in country districts, and the illiteracy of negroes between ten and fourteen years of age being rather less than that of all negroes living in cities having at least 25,000 inhabitants. If the per cent. of illiteracy among negroes should continue to dwindle in the future as rapidly as it did, 1890 to 1900, an improbable contingency, negro illiteracy would disappear by 1940.

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.

These figures of occupations seem to me to furnish the best statistical clue yet obtained for an understanding of the industrial and social changes affecting this question in the South. My interpretation of their meaning might be objected to on the ground that when the negroes are increasing more slowly than the whites, as they are at present in the South, it should not be expected that they would increase as fast as whites in the skilled occupations. This objection seems to me to invert the true order of causation, to put the cart before the horse. Should we not rather say that southern negroes are increasing at the present time only two-thirds as fast as southern whites, while from 1800 to 1840 they increased faster and from 1840 to 1880 nearly as fast, because they are not succeeding in entering new occupations or prospering as well in their old as the competing race is doing?

If this view of the process is correct, then one may add in closing that, as these occupation figures throw much light upon the causes, so the figures of an almost stationary death-rate for negroes compared with a rapidly decreasing death-rate for whites, and an apparently declining birth-rate for negroes compared with an actually increasing birth-rate for southern whites, are the best statistical keys to its effects.

Walter F. Willcox.

Cornell University.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See especially Census Bulletin 8 entitled “Negroes in the United States,” Washington, 1904.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

The cover image for this eBook has been created by the transcriber and is entered into the public domain.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.