ealth of the Negroes. He pointed out
that their general death rate was about double that of the whites,
their pneumonia rates more than three times as high, and their
syphilis rate more than five times as high as the whites. In
proportion to the population, he affirmed also that three times as
many Negro children died before birth as whites, and that three times
as many of the babies born alive died before their first birthday
anniversary; and that the excess in deaths of Negroes from preventable
causes alone was so great that it accounts for more than one point in
the general death rate of the city.[159]

This rush of the Negroes to the North, moreover, was accompanied by
smallpox and venereal diseases. Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, for
example, faced a danger of epidemic from the former and were compelled
to undertake wholesale vaccination of laborers in camps and mills. In
one year the city of Cleveland also reported 330 cases of this malady.
As to venereal diseases these became so rife that some industries
adopted the physical examination system as a part of application for
work. One large sugar refinery found after three weeks of this
experiment that three in every ten Negro applicants had to be rejected
because of syphilis or gonorrhea. An examination of 800 Negroes at a
large railroad camp showed that 70 per cent of them were infected with
tuberculosis, syphilis, or gonorrhea, and that nearly 80 per cent of
the total were infected with the latter disease. This, however, was
the case for the most part only among the shiftless, the casuals and
floaters, for the examinations of the better type of Negroes showed
that the percentage of those affected by those diseases was
exceedingly small.

The recent movement brought to the cities of the North a multitude of
ignorant Negroes mostly from the farms and plantations of the South,
where opportunities for education are almost unknown. To the majority
of them city life was an entirely new thing, and especially strange to
them was the extremely complex life of the large cities of the North.
Theirs, therefore, was an extremely difficult task to adapt themselves
to the mores of these places, and in their efforts to do so, it is
very obvious that they could not avoid committing errors. Furthermore,
there were among these migrants many who, having been freed from the
influence of the strict moral and religious checks of the southern
communities, lost complete control of themse