The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1925, Sheet 39

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

Negro himself can feel and appreciate that fact.
However, we of another people might, by remem-
bering the price the Negro paid for his progress,
be taught to be somewhat more sympathetic and to
encourage one another to help him as much as we
can to ascend still higher.

With these thoughts in mind we may now pro-
ceed to a discussion of

Tue Present PuystcatL ConpITION
or THE NEGRO.

Humanly speaking, the reduction and decrease
of disease is fundamental to the progress of any
people. Poor health is, to the individual as well
as to a race, a serious handicap to advancement.
No race can advance when infected with disease
and showing a low vitality. Disease and a high
death-rate were the enemies of the Negro. Ravag-
ing diseases were taking the youth, and with
them were buried the hopes of greater attainment.
While slowly emerging from this condition, there
is still to-day, as calculated by one of the larger
insurance companies, a death-rate of 60 per cent.
of colored persons in excess of that of its white
policy holders. The 1910 census reports the death,
during the first twelve months of life alone, of
almost 22 per cent. of Negro males born. A white
boy’s expectation of life at birth is fifty years, a
Negro boy’s but thirty-four. It is claimed that
450,000 Negroes in the South are seriously ill all
the time. What a mighty foe!

It is of interest to note here those diseases which
are most fatal to Negroes. Diseases of infancy are
the causes of 27 per cent. of all deaths among them.
Tuberculosis is responsible for 18 per cent. of the
deaths; pneumonia, for 11 per cent.; diseases of
the heart, for 8 per cent.; Bright’s disease, for
7% per cent. It has been estimated that 600,000
Negroes of the present population of the country
will die from tuberculosis.

These few statistics clearly show us that the
Negro race, as such, is seriously handicapped by
disease. And we wonder whether there is not a
reason for all this. To be sure, there is. And only
as that cause is gradually removed, will health con-
ditions among them improve.

THE HaNnpicAP oF IGNORANCE.
An experience related just in this connection
“may help us to find one reason for the present
physical condition of the Negro. It happened on
a rainy March day in a little Southern town. As
we were going through the Negro section, we were

39

attracted by the voices of children coming from
a three-room cabin in which we knew three of the
children to be suffering from a severe attack of
measles. We walked toward the house and, coming
to its wire enclosures, saw there sitting on the floor
of the porch, as the rain was trickling on them
through the holes in the roof, those three ill Negro
children. Every mother knows, or ought to know,
that such exposure during an attack of measles is
opening the door to the grim reaper. Fortunately
these children survived, but many others, through
such neglect, die a premature death. If one could
collect statistics on this point, the result would be

An Alabama Negro Home.

appalling. You must understand that we are not
claiming this to be wilful neglect, but we are in-
clined to ascribe it-to ignorance. However, when
we bring to mind how often just such neglect has-
tens on death, we are happy to see the ever-increas-
ing efforts made to educate the mothers of the race
by the higher educational institutions for Negro |
girls, social agencies, and insurance companies.

Tip RESULTS OF UNSANITARY CONDITIONS.

Another condition which beyond a doubt has
contributed more than its share toward the death-
rate among Negroes is sanitation, or rather, the
lack of it. This condition, let us remember, is not
wholly of the Negro’s own making. We recall hay-