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Excerpted from W. E. Burghardt DuBois, ed. The Health and Physique of the Negro American. Report of a Social Study Made Under the Direction of Atlanta University; Together With the Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference for the Study of the Negro Problems, Held at Atlanta University, on May the 29th, 1906. Atlanta, Ga: Atlanta University Press; 1906.
THE GENERAL OPINION IS THAT THE DEATH RATE OF NEGROES is higher in the North than in the South. This is untrue. The crude death rates of the Negroes in the Northern cities are lower than those in the Southern cities... of the large cities, the eight highest death rates are Southern cities-Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, Richmond, Norfolk, Nashville, St. Louis and Atlanta. Thirty deaths per 1,000 seems to be the dividing line between the Northern cities and the Southern, most of the Southern cities having a rate above 30, while most of the Northern cities have a rate below 30.
Chicago, with about the same population of Negroes as Charleston and Nashville, has less than one-half as many deaths per 1,000 as the former and two-thirds as the latter. New York, with about the same population as New Orleans, has about two-thirds as many deaths per 1,000; Norfolk has twice the rate of Indianapolis.
An analysis of the Negro population in these cities, however, gives the North a decided advantage, in that the number of children is less in the North than in the South and since the first five years of life have a very high mortality, that section having a smaller proportion of children all other things being equal, ought to show the lowest general crude death rate....
Carrying the argument further, there are two matters of evidence which can not be controverted. (1) In the diseases peculiar to manhood, the North has no advantage but a real disadvantage since a larger proportion of the Negro inhabitants in the Northern cities is between the ages of 15 and 50, than is the case in the Southern cities.
(2) Tuberculosis is a disease of adult life, attacking those chiefly past 15 years of age and is most prevalent between 20 and 30.
According to a bulletin published by the Illinois state board...