Note 185 — Chapter XVIII

According to Captain (now Lt. Col.) E. B. Vedder of the Medical Corps, U. S. A., 50% of the Negroes of the class applying for enlistment in the army are syphilitic. He believes that the amount of infection among Negro women is about the same. (Therapeutic Gazette, May 15, 1916.) Venereal disease must, then, play a much more important part than is generally supposed, in cutting down the birth-rate of the Negro race, but it would of course be a mistake to suppose that an abnormally low birth-rate among Negroes is always to be explained on this ground. Professor Kelly Miller points out (Scientific Monthly, June, 1917) that the birth-rate among college professors at Howard University, the leading Negro institution for higher education, is only 0.7 of a child and that the completed families will hardly have more than two children. He attributes this to (1) the long period of education required of Negro "intellectuals", (2) the high standard of living required of them, and (3) the unwillingness of some of them to bring children into the world, because of the feeling that these children would suffer from race prejudice.