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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - III. Population and Migration - 7. Population - 2. Births and Deaths
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Chapter 7. Population 163
abnormally high, since there is an abnormally large number of persons in
the child-bearing age groups (this is so because they were born in a period
with higher fertility). This is slightly more true of Negroes than of whites,
since most of the foreign-born are white, and they are now mostly in the
older age groups. In 1940, 41.1 per cent of the nonwhite females, as com-
pared to 39.2 per cent of the white females, were between the ages of 20
and 45.^® The effect on the white birth rate will come sooner, both because
Negroes have had a somewhat higher birth rate and because they, as a
result of higher mortality and fewer foreign-born, have, and probably will
continue to have, a relatively smaller proportion of persons in ages above
the fertile age groups. Likewise, even though the death rate declines some-
what for each age group of both white and Negro populations, the crude
death rate will tend to increase as the proportion of persons in high age
groups increases. And for the same reasons, the rise in the death rate will
come sooner for whites than for Negroes.
Considering the differences in age structure alone, which are causing the
decline in the crude birth rate and the rise in the crude rate to come
sooner for whites than for Negroes, we have another reason why—for a
while at least—the proportion of Negroes in the total population will
increase. It must be remembered, however, that future changes in fertility
and mortality will change the entire pattern. Of particular interest for our
present problem would be the effects of a large-scale disease prevention
campaign. Since Negro death rates are now considerably higher than white
death rates, it Is more possible to bring them down. Any impartial efforts
to reduce sickness and death in the nation will have much more effect on
Negroes than on whites simply because Negroes have much more pre-
ventable and curable disease to begin with.® We have observed that a more
rapid fall of Negro mortality has probably already occurred during the
’thirties.
Migration will continue to be a great importance for future trends
in Negro birth and death rates. Migration from rural to urban areas
universally reduces the birth rate.^^ It has been related to the main set of
causal factors behind the reduction of both white and Negro fertility over
the last 70 years. In recent decades the effects have probably been more
pronounced for the Negroes than for the whites, since a larger proportion
of Negroes have left the farms for the cities, and since the rural South
and the urban North represent more the extremes of country and city
than the places whites predominantly come from and go to.^^ Even within
the South the places to which Negroes have been migrating—^the larger
cities and the rural areas of the Mississippi Valley^^—are those of lowest
birth rate. While whites also are moving to cities and to rural areas in the
western part of the South, their birth rates are apparently not lowered so
* Sec Section 5 of this chapter.
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