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 widelydifferent races are so important as in the United States.As a natural result of this, there is no country in which statisticalinvestigation of race questions is so highly developed, or inwhich the records cover so long a time. In Europe it is notcustomary to recognize or emphasize the race classification ofthe population in statistical returns. In India the race classificationwhile recognized is subsidiary to that of religionand of language. In American countries to the south of theUnited States where race relations are as complex and as diverseas they are with us, the statistical method is imperfectly developedor of recent introduction. The main sources of statistical information,therefore, regarding race relations are the figures forthe United States and those for several of the West IndianIslands.
Since the Civil War the statistical study of certain aspects ofrace questions in the United States has been entered upon bydifferent governmental agencies. The Department of Agriculturehas made investigations of the diet and food supply ofnegroes and of whites with especial reference to the bodily heatand the energy it can produce. The Department of Labor hasmade a number of suggestive reports upon the condition of negrocommunities in certain typical localities. Various municipalhealth reports throw light upon the vital statistics of the tworaces. The Bureau of Education has gathered much informationregarding the educational development of negroes andwhites. But no one of these and perhaps not all of them combinedhave furnished or are furnishing at the present time asmuch information regarding the statistics of race in the UnitedStates as the Census Bureau.[1] It is of the highest importancethat the information thus gathered should be carefully and intelligentlyinterpreted and its lessons correctly read. The objectof this paper is to state certain conclusions to which I havebeen brought by my statistical studies of the subject and especiallyof the recent census figures.
The population of the United States is divided by the censusreturns into four classes, the native white of native parents, thenative white of foreign born parents, that is, the children ofimmigrants, the immigrant or foreign born white class, and theother races than the white, sometimes called collectively thecolored, perhaps more accurately described as the “non-Caucasians.”The most accurate description of them is to enumeratethe great races to which they belong, namely, the negro, Indianand Mongolian. Of this fourth group, the non-Caucasians, morethan nineteen-twentieths are negroes and therefore when statementsare made, as I shall be compelled sometimes to makethem, not for the negroes but for the non-Caucasians, it willbe understood that nineteen-twentieths of these are negroes andwhat is true, therefore, of the non-Caucasians is probably trueof the negroes. These four classes correspond roughly to fourgrades of economic well-being,—the native white of nativeparents at the top, the negroes, Indians, and Mongolians at thebottom. Now it is a general fact that the lower the scale ofe