Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr.
- Haller, John S., Jr., 1940-
- Date:
- [1971]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![Physician versus Negro • 41 ard of the Freedmen's Bureau was concerned enough to send J. W. Alvord, his general superintendent of education, on a trip through the southern states to verify the growing behefs that Negroes were diseased and degraded, that they [were] all dying off, that they [were] killing their children, and that they [would] not work.^ To be sure, there were skeptics who pointed to the absolute nu¬ merical increase of the Negro in America, as opposed to the appar¬ ent percentage rate decline of Negroes in the total population.^ There were also those elements in American society for whom the wdsh for the Negro's extinction was father to the thought. For them, the belief usually required a need for continuous reassertion that the evidence was, indeed, truthful.^ Yet, despite the complex¬ ity of the problem and the reservations of many, the belief in the Negro's extinction became one of the most pervasive ideas in Amer¬ ican medical and anthropological thought during the late nine¬ teenth century. It was also a fitting culmination to the concept of racial inferiority in American life. The census reports, along with insurance and army statistics on the apparent decline in vitality of the American Negro, brought Statistical Association, Publications, II (1890), 91-106; Samuel J. Holmes, The Negro's Struggle for Survival (Berkeley, Calif., 1937), 14-16; George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from i6ig to 1880, 2 vols. ( New York, 1883), II, 417, 549-51; U.S. Department of Labor, Condition of the Negro in Various Cities, Bulletin, no. 10 ( 1897), 257-369; W, J. Trent, Jr., Development of Negro Insurance Enterprises (M.B.A. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1932), 17-18; Winfred O. Bryson, Jr., Negro Life Insurance Companies (Ph.D. thesis, Univer¬ sity of Pennsylvania, 1948), 7, 46, 99, 30, 26; The Colored Race in Life Assur¬ ance, Lancet (London), II (Oct., 1898), 902; Frederick L. Hoffman, History of the Prudential Insurance Company of America (Newark, N.J., 1900), 153, 210-11; Hoffman, The Statistical Experience Data of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1892- 1911, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Reports, XVII ( 1916), 185-345. 3 J. W. Alvord, Letters from the South Relating to the Condition of the Freed- men Addressed to Major General O. O. Howard (Washington, D.C., 1870), i, 23. 4 E. W. Cilliam, The African in the United States, Popidar Science Monthly, XXII (Feb., 1883), 433-45; Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, II, 417-18; Holmes, The Negro's Struggle for Survival, 1-5; Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (Washington, D.C., 1918), chap. I; U.S. Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth from the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth, 1790-igoo (Baltimore, 1967), 92; Philip A. Bruce, The Plan¬ tation Negro as a Freeman: Observations on His Character, Condition, and Pros¬ pects in Virginia (New York, 1889), 261-62. 5 Williams, History of the Negro Race in America, II, 417; Henry Gannett, Are We to Become Africanized? Popular Science Monthly, XXVII (June, 1885), 145-50.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18025729_0062.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
