University of Virginia Library

Tasks Not Being Adequately Met

We call attention to some joint tasks which could be met if approached with collective efficiency. The Negro race in the United States, with all its marvelous progress, is threatened with death as a race. Health records show that it began life under freedom with sounder bodies and better health than the white people of this country. They were freer from consumption than the whites. At the present time Negro policy-holders in insurance companies, (the most healthy type of the race), have twice the death rate of the whites for consumption. Negro boys between the ages 10 and 14 have a death rate eleven times that of white boys of similar ages. Negro girls of these ages have a death rate eight times that of white girls of the same age.

In addition to the ravages of disease germs, Negroes are being mowed down by deadly weapons in their hands. Negroes in one Southern city killed eleven more of their own race in one year than were lynched by the more than thirty millions of white people of the South during the past three years. The Negroes kill each other at about ten times the rate at which white people kill each other. The disposition of the colored people to kill each other has lifted ten southern cities to the pinnacle of being the greatest murder centers of the world, a shameful eminence that stings to the quick. The three cities of the North which lead all their sister cities of that section in the rate of homicides are cities to which colored people have gone in large numbers in

recent yearn and a public official in one of those cities says that eighty per cent of the crimes of brutality have been comitted by persons that have been there less than a year. The colored people in one southern city have boosted the murder rate until in 1928 it was four times that of Chicago, six times the average rate of American cities, thirty-five and one-half times that of Canada. and one hundred and twenty times that of England and Wales.