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<h1><center>Ambushed in the City<br>
The Grim Side of Harlem</center></h2>
<h2><center>By WINTHROP D. LANE</h2></center>
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<p>A unkempt woman, with hair graying, shoulders rounded and eyes
rimmed with thick glasses, reads a newspaper on a subway car in New
York City. She is colored. Her skirt is in rags, one toe shows through
a shoe, an elbow pushes the lining of her sleeve into sight; perhaps
she has just left her mop and pail in some downtown office building.
Turning the pages hastily, she seems to be hunting for a particular
place. At last she stops. Her forefinger runs up and down the columns.
She is looking at the financial page. Finding an item, she gazes
closely at it for a moment, and then throws the paper onto the seat
beside her. She has a dejected look. Apparently she is through with
the paper.
<p>She has been looking for "the numbers." The numbers she wanted were
the day's totals of bank exchanges and bank balances--announced each
day by the Clearing House and published by the newspapers. On these
she has been gambling. Suppose the exchanges were $793,482,450 and
the balances $86,453,624. She is then interested in the number 936,
because that is made up of the seventh and eighth digits, reading from
the right, of the first, and the seventh digit of the second. She and
many others are playing this game--a species of policy. If she has put
her money, which may be only a few pennies, on 936 that day, she wins.
Each day she looks forward to discovering what this combination is. It
is the bright spot for her.
<p>The stakes are high if she wins. She reaps 600 times what she
wagers. If she wagers a nickel, she wins thirty dollars; if she wagers
a quarter, she wins $150; a deposit of fifty cents will bring her
$300. These stakes have lure; they are a king's stakes. They will make
her rich for the moment. She does not consider the chances against
her. She does not consider that she has never won and that only once
did she ever hear of anybody winning. The bare possibility of
capturing so much money makes her heart beat faster.
<p>Since there are 999 numbers of three digits, or 1000 if we include
000, she seems to have about one chance in a thousand of winning. By
the law of averages, she might play the same number daily for three
years without a strike. The banker pays 600 times the sum wagered. He,
therefore, seems to have a sure thing; barring lucky wins by large
gamblers, he can't lose in the long run. That does not interest her,
either.
<p>All Harlem is ablaze ith "the numbers." People play it everywhere,
in tenements, on street corners, in the backs of shops. "Bankers"
organize it, promote it, encourage it. They send their runners into
flats and stores. You give the runner the money you are betting, write
your number on a slip of paper, and wait. If the number you chose is
the one that wins next day, you get your money. Runners round up new
business, stake off territory and canvass all the people they can
reach. A person living in an apartment house may be the agent for
that house. The names of these bankers are known in the neighborhood.
One rides around in a $12,000 limousine and has a liveried chauffeur.
Minor bankers abound; men and women, getting $200 capital start in the
"numbers" business. Recently, it is said, white men have been trying
to wrest the control of the game from blacks; a Jew who formerly used
his talents in the hooch business is spoken of as the leader in this
effort.
<p>"Always out first with the bank clearing numbers" reads a placard
advertising the New York Sun in Harlem. Inspiration for lucky numbers
is got from every source. People get their numbers from dream books;
fifteen or twenty cents will buy a dream book! and a dream about any
topic listed in it has an appropriate number. Or two people exchange
street addresses. "Ah'm gonna play it! Ah'm gonna play it !" says one,
as he takes down the address of the other. They get their numbers from
the numbers of hymns given out in church, from subway cars, from
telephone numbers, from dates, from baseball scores, from the prices
they pay for purchased articles, from the license tags of passing
automobiles. By combining or rearranging these, or using them
unchanged, they tempt fortune.
<p>One trouble is, of course, that they don't always get what they
win. Many a banker, finding that large sums have been won from him,
avoids payment; his victim has no recourse, since the whole
transaction is outside the law. The streets of Harlem are being walked
by people looking for those who owe them money won at "the numbers."
The New York Age, a colored weekly, published a story about one banker
who skipped to Cuba with $100.000 taken from the Negroes of Harlem; it
is common to win $12, $18 and $30 and not get it. This is only an
exasperation of the extortion. The whole game, as it is staged, smells
of exploitation.
<p>GREAT number of Negroes have recently swarmed up from the South to
swell the Negro colonies of Northern cities. Many of them are
unfamiliar with city ways. They have become an invitation to the
exploiter and the fakir--the gambling promoter, the necromancer, the
fortune teller, the fake druggist, the quack doctor, and even more
deliberate cheaters, such as the rent gouger. Living compactly in
restricted areas, they supply a fertile field. Density of population
is the fakir's paradise; it is the cheater's fairest opportunity for
secrecy and success. There he can strike and hide, or be continuously
lost in the moving mass of his fellow beings. And, credulous and
child-like, the Negro peasant migrant has provided fresh opportunities
in Northern cities for many forms of exploitation.
<p>Black art flourishes in Harlem--and elsewhere in New York. Egyptian
seers uncover hidden knowledge, Indian fortune-tellers reveal the
future, sorcerers perform their mysteries. Feats of witchcraft are
done daily. A towel for turban and a smart manner are enough to
transform any Harlem colored man into a dispenser of magic to his
profit.
<p>Come with me into any little stationery store on Lenox or
Seventh Avenues--the two main business thoroughfares of the
district--and peep into the dream and mystery books there offered for
sale. Some of these can be bought, as said, for fifteen or twenty
cents; others cost a dollar. Here is one called Albertus Magnus. It is
described as the "approved, verified, sympathetic and natural Egyptian
secrets, or White and Black Art for Man, and Beast, revealing the
Forbidden Knowledge and Mysteries of Ancient Philosophers." Another is
Napoleon's own Oraculum and Book of Fate, containing the explanations
of dreams and other mysteries consulted on every occasion by Napoleon
himself.
<p>Stop in front of a well-known drug store on Lenox Avenue. Here
roots, herbs and barks are displayed in the window. "Devil's
Shoestring" one of these is called; others are "Jim Shanks," "John
Conqueror," "Rattlesnake Master," "Sacred Bark" and "Jesuits' Barlc."
In curled forms, in powders, in spirally bunches, in thick lfttle
knots, they lie there; they are sold as cures for various forms of
illness. I was interested in knowing just what these were; so I asked
the druggist. He showed me the United States Dispensatory. Some of the
names in his window are local and folk names for plants growing in
various parts of this country and elsewhere, and these plants are
mentioned in the Dispensatory as being credited with cathartic,
diaphoretic and other medicinal qualities. That is all very well; it
does not mean that taking these roots and leaves home and boiling them
and then drinking the water enables you to obtain the benefit ot those
qualities. The plants have other qualities which come out in the water
as well as those you want, and you get the essence of the whole, uhich
may have quite other effects than those you anticipate. Again, no one
can tell wLether these plants are really what they are represented to
be or not. Their sale is under no supervision; they may be roots of
saplings dug in the Bronx, or bark from cherry trees disguised.
<p>In these matters the Negro is, in large measure, his own enemy. He
is bringing his own simplicity to the help of those who would take
advantage of him. No good can come from blinking the fact that the
Negro is, by and large, the great exploitable race of the Western
world. Many Negroes find it so easy to expect something wonderful to
happen; eager for pleasure, they are sanguinely expectant that it
awaits them around every corner. They have the child's love of
phantasy, too; they would escape from the harsh realities of a world
in which they are not treated very well.
<p>In addition to all this, many of the uneducated majority have a
deeply imbedded trust in the white man--a holdover from slavery. This
lies at the root of much exploitation. The Negro comes to our Northern
cities, and we think that he is ready to cope with the complexity of
St. Louis, Chicago and New York City. He is not. To transplant him
from Georgia to Lenox Avenue is not to change him on the train; often
he is still the simple and innocent child of his Southern life.
<p>I am not blithely cataloging the Negro here as the possessor of a
"child-mind." That is the pet formula of pseudoscientific race
detractors. The Negro has sufficiently proved--and this number of
Survey Graphic is only further proof--that, given opportunities, he
can rise to any heights. The simplicity, innocence and child-like
qualities of some Negroes are due in large part to lack of education
and to the lack of certain kinds of experiences. They have not been
invited to play an aggressive role, or even to create beautiful
things. They have been kept under the thumb of the whites. Their
innocence is the sort that you will find among rural whites and
"green" foreign immigrants; it is "peasant-mindedness" in part.
<p>Neither the facts, nor the explanations of the facts, however,
justify members of his own race, or whites, in taking advantage of the
simplicity that lies around them.
<p>THERE are ways in which the Negro is more deliberately exploited in
Harlem than in other Northern cities. He is subject to being fleeced
in rent; This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is cold fact. I am not
here referring merely to high rents, to "what the traffic will bear."
I am referring to extortion.
<p>The Negro is gouged. Because he is a Negro, because he can be taken
advantage of, because his racial position makes it possible to gouge
him, he is gouged.
<p>Hear John R. Davies, judge in the Mullicipal Court in Harlem, who
sees colored tenants pass in streams before him, seeking relief: "It
is common for colored tenants in Harlem to pay twice as much as white
tenants for the same apartments. "
<p>Hear Lillian Grant, acting chairman of the Mayor's Committee on
Rent Profiteering, also white, who looks at the whole city and sees
Harlem in the perspective of comparison: "Negroes pay exorbitant
rents. Their situation is terrible."
<p>Let us come to particulars. Sophie Ellerbee is a colored tenant
worth knowing. She came into court the other day and told the judge
that the white family preceding her in the apartment into which she
had just moved had paid $50 a month; the corporation owning it svas
asking her to pay $75 now. This increase she thought excessive. Her
attorney requested that the owner be brought into court and required
to divulge its income, expenses and investment (as it could be
compelled to do under the law), and thus to show whether the rent was
justified. The jury awarded Mrs. Ellerbee a $20 reduction from the sum
asked. When the verdict was announced, the attorney for the owner, who
was a colored lawyer, moved to have it set aside.
<p>"This rent is justified," he said. "The colored district is
crowded. These Negroes cannot go anywhere else. If they attempt to
move into houses formerly occupied by whites, they should pay what the
landlords ask. It is the law of supply and demand."
<p>The judge, Jacob Panken, flamed at him. Judge Panken had seen many
colored tenants come into court `with tales similar to that of Mrs.
Ellerbee and he said:
<p>"I agree that the verdict should be set aside, but for the purpose
of securing Mrs. Ellerbee a still greater reduction in rent. Your own
client has admitted that it is making $10,000 a year on a $30,000
investrnent. That is excessive. This rent is too large. And you, as a
colored attorney, ought to be ashamed of yourself. You as a lawyer are
helping colored and white landlords to prey on your own."
<p>As the attorney left the court, embarrassed, cries of "Shame!" came
to him from the Negro spectators in the room.
<p>Other colored tenants were in court the same day. Through the
services of a white lawyer twenty-one of these secured reductions
varying from $10 to $23 below the rents asked. "It is pretty good
evidence that the landlord knows he is charging excessive rents if he
accepts a reduction voluntarily, without going to trial," said the
attorney. The calendar of the Municipal Court in Harlem is crowded
with the cases of colored tenants seeking relief. The white lawyer who
acts as attorney for the West Harlem Tenants' League, an organization
befriending tenants in that neighborhood, had 15 cases set down for
trial on one day, 41 on another, 37 on another and 32 on another.
<p>The National Urban League is an organization of white and colored
social workers and others. It is interested in the welfare of city
Negroes. The New York branch of the league studied rents paid by both
white and colored people in blocks accomodating both in the spring of
1924. "We found that Negroes paid from 40 to 60 per cent higher rents
than white people did for the same class of apartments," said Mr.
Hubert, secretary of the Harlem office.
<p>Through the courts, under the emergency New York state rent laws,
relief can be secured. It is the families that do not go to court that
continue to pay the unduly high rents. Unfortunately these are the
vast majority. For every Mrs. Ellerbee there are many- other colored
tenants who, through ignorance, inertia or the congestion of the court
calendar, do not get relief. Obviously individual trials cannot be
given every tenant who is charged too high rent in Harlem; the court
of justice is not the remedy for an extensive economic practice.
<p>Let us look for a moment at the growth of this situation. Fifteen
years ago Harlem as it is today did not exist; the colored population
then was much smaller than it is now. It has grown continuously,
swollen by additions from without. As the colored area grew, it has
pressed against contiguous white territories. Block after block gave
way. Stubbornly each block yielded. White people did not want to see
their neighborhoods turn black. First one street was set as the "dead
line" (in the white parlance) of the Negro advance, and then another.
Always there were outposts, colored families breaking over the bounds
and invading territory hitherto exclusively white.
<p>This situation is the paradise of the ruthless landlord, or rent
charger. If you own an apartment house in Harlem, if you do not live
in it, and if you want the largest profits you can get, you will open
it to those tenants who will pay you most. These are the tenants who
are most in need of it. The whites do not have to have it. They can
go elsewhereÑ to other parts of the city, to the suburbs, or they can
just keep ahead of the Negro invasion and move a few blocks away. The
Negro cannot; he will not be given an apartment elsewhere, he cannot
be easily accomodated. He can live only in a limited area, and that
area grows only bit by bit. So he will pay what you askÑor; rather, he
will agree to pay what you ask and then he will pay it if he can.
<p>The profiteering is not all done by white landlords. There are men
of both races who have a reputation for fairness. There are colored
operators who have performed a public service to their race in
addressing themselves to the extreme problem of shelter, but there are
colored owners of houses who charge just as high rents as do white
owners. Investigation shows that taking advantage of the colored
people, or making money out of them; is not a white monopoly.
<p>How, it will be asked, do Negroes find money to pay these rents? By
strategy, and taking their own part. They do it by going without other
things. They cut down on fun, food and clothing, and stretch what
money they have to cover the rent. But they have other tricks. One is
the "rent party." This is a popular form of diversion in Harlem. It
goes by the name of the "social parlor." A person invites friends in
for the evening, to dance and have a good time, and charges them
twenty-five cents a couple; that is one way of getting help to meet
the monthly rent bill. Another is to take in lodgers. Lodgers are
legion in Harlem. The State Housing Commission told of one apartment
properly accomodating about ten persons that was occupied by
forty-four. Harlem has gone to the extreme of the double shift. One
room is not infrequently let out to two people, one of whom occupies
it at night and the other during the day.
<p>THE moment one begins to inquire about exploitation in Harlem, he
hears about cabarets. In Harlem there are cabarets to which both white
and colored people are admitted. There are cabarets where white and
colored sit at the same table, dance together, talk together, drink
together, leave together. Many flashy young people of both colors come
to these and get riotously or near riotously merry; some less flashy
people come; and some sober and sedate folk sit at the tables. All
told there are about fifteen cabarets in Harlem. A few cater only to
the well-behaved, others to the less well-behaved, and some to
roughnecks Two or three of the better places are now the resorts of
downtown specialists in the latest places of interest.
<p>No doubt people are fleeced a bit in paying for their
entertainment, no doubt some people are swept along pretty rapidly on
a current of erotic pleasure, a current of uncertain direction and
ambiguous goal. But they come there of their own accord; they seek the
cabaret. As an instrument of exploitation the cabaret does not touch
many people. Its scope is the.scope of a retreat for devotees.
<p>Another subject often mentioned in connection with exploitation is
prostitution. I am aware of no way of proving that the Negro is
sexually more or less moral than other people. If there is any
exceptional organized assault upon the continence of Negro women, I do
not know of it.
<p>LET us turn now to the gentle subject of hooch. Harlem is
hooch-ridden. He is a bold man who will undertake to say what part of
a city like New York, with its many congested foreign and native
quarters, is the wettest. The wash of the booze sea has not left
Harlem out; that district may well claim a deeper inundation than any
other.
<p>Those syndicates, or firms, or companies, or combinations, that set
you up in business as a druggist, equipping you with the white jars
and other colorful stock of a druggist's shelves, in order that behind
your counters you may run a hooch dispensary, have lined Lenox and
Seventh Avenues with such fake establishments. These sell rivers of
bad booze to the colored residents of Harlem. There are excellent drug
stores in Harlem, but these are drug stores only in name. They have
small stocks and cannot fill prescriptions adequately. They specialize
in synthetic gin and bad whiskey. Practically all of these places are
owned by white people.
<p>There are syndicates also that fit you out with the window displays
and front rooms of delicatessen stores.
<p>"A Negro clerk who works in a drug store on Lenox Avenue came
running in to me the other day," a competent colored pharmacist in
Harlem said to me. "He said: 'A friend of mine brought this
prescription into my store. I can't fill it. You fill it for me. If
he'd been a stranger, I'd have given him something. But I don't want
to hand out to a friend that stuff we have on our shelves.' He didn't
bother much with prescriptions, he confessed. Sometimes he put in
substitute ingredients; sometimes he left out something that was
called for. 'You leave your label off this and I'll put ours on' he
said."
<p>The Negro pharmacist continued:
<p>"Some of these drug stores certainly are fakes. Why, they don't
keep enough drugs on hand to fill simple prescriptions. Not long ago I
sent three prescriptions out to fifteen of 'em--easy prescriptions; I
just wanted to make a little experiment. I didn't bother with those
drug stores over on Lenox Avenue--I knew what I'd be gettin' into
there. I just stuck to Seventh Avenue.
<p>"Well, you should have seen the collection that came back. One
prescription called for a nerve sedative, a compound of chloral
hydrate, tincture canabis and some other things. Two druggists put
elixir of lactated pepsin--for indigestion!--into the prescription,
instead of the elixir triple bromides I called for. And you should
have seen those bottles! Some were half choked with gelatinous
substances that had no business there; others had sediment. They were
every color from yellow to dark brown. Why, those druggists just put
in any old thing. Another prescription called for a seven-grain
capsule. The capsules that came back weighed all the way from three
grains to ten; the average was about four. They couldn't even get the
quantity right! Those stores are a crime. 'Anything's good enough for
niggers!' say the people who run them."
<p>There are other forms of hooch joints--cigar stores, small
restaurants, saloon-like shops, delicatessen stores and the like. The
drinks they sell are very bad; it is commonly declared that the worst
of the illegal booze is worked off on the Negro. These places have
been exposed. Their addresses have been published time and again. The
owner of The New York Age, Fred R. Moore, already referred to, is a
fighting Negro. He is educated and intelligent. He believes in
protecting his people from exploitation. Every week for months he has
been publishing in his weekly a list of addresses; over it he puts the
headline: Old and New Hooch Joints in Harlem. I know of no
publication of a similar list of addresses elsewhere.
<p>Sometimes Mr. Moore puts his list on the front page; it runs to
about a hundred addresses. Here is part of the list on one street,
taken from the issue of October 25, 1924: 404, 414, 419, 434, 448,
452, 481, 476, 477, 486, 488a--eleven within a single hundred numbers.
Mr. Moore has never been the defendant in a libel action for
characterizing these places as illegally engaged in selling liquor,
and that fact is pretty good evidence that they are really what he
calls them.
<p>THE Negro in Harlem, like Negroes in many other places, is prey for
poorly-trained white doctors and for unmistakable quacks. Some of
these come to Harlem because they know that here quackery is easy;
they fatten on the credulity of the Negro, and on his faith in the
white man. Many of these doctors are prominent members of the
community; a population of 200,000 spreads out before them. offering a
lucrative field, and they take advantage of it.
<p>Not long ago a white doctor in Harlem dismissed a colored patient,
telling him that he had "spider cancer" at the base of his spine, and
that it was incurable. Now, there is no such thing as spider cancer.
The man had come to the doctor because he had hurt his back in a fall.
The doctor applied dressing after dressing and plaster after plaster,
and finally produced a creased, web-like spot on the man's back; it was
this that he called "spider cancer." The poor fellow received proper
treatment only when he went to a trained colored physician in the
neighborhood.
<p>"We know some of our white colleagues by their trails," said a
colored physician, attached to the out-patient department of Harlem
Hospital, to me. He was unwilling to be quoted if the names of these
doctors were to be used, and so I have substituted letters for their
names. "There's Doctor X, for instance. He is known by the plasters he
leaves behind him. Whenever a patient has a pain, X puts a plaster
over it. If you raise the shirt of a patient and find a plaster of
mole skin adhesive there, you can say, 'Oh, I see you've been to
Doctor X.' He always uses mole skin adhesive.
<p>"Then there's Doctor Y. He uses pills, rotating them by color.
'What color did I give you last time ?' he asks his patients, and then
changes to another. It's easy to follow Doctor Y; just look at the
mantlepiece and if his pills are there, you know what your patient has
been up against.
<p>"Doctor Z flops down on his knees and prays and prays with his
patients. Though white, he knows his colored people, or a certain
class of them. He will blare out in fine style his appeals to the Lord
to help the treatment he has just given. I guess prayer is often
necessary.
<p>"Then there's Doctor A. 'What!' exclaimed Doctor A. 'Read medical
books! I haven't read a medical book for ten years. I don't have to
read 'em to practice on niggers!'
<p>"They charge some of these colored people pretty high fees, too.
The other day a white doctor charged $600 for drawing the water off a
patient who had pleurisy--aspirating, it is called. This is ordinarily
done by a physician in the course of a routine call. This doctor
called it 'a major operation' and collected $600. They play on the
Negro's ignorance of what is being done to him, and rob him."
<p>ALL this, it can readily be imagined, has none too good an effect
upon the Negro's health.
<p>Any improvement that the race makes is made despite great
obstacles. We all have heard that the Negro is not a healthy race. In
a measure, this is true. Tuberculosis is the great enemy of the
Negro. In the long run it kills one out of every six; few races show a
greater tuberculosis deathrate. The incidence of rickets, a disease of
malnutrition among children, is also high with the Negro. Chronic
degenerative diseases, such as cerebral hemorrhage and organic
diseases of the heart, are strong among Negroes. Cancer and diabetes
carry off large numbers of them. The deathrate for the race as a whole
is high, especially in cities.
<p>In 1921 the deathrate among Negroes in the rural parts of
registration states was 13.8 per 1,000; it was 10.8 for whites. In the
cities it was 19.7 for Negroes, 11.8 for whites. Mortality among
Negroes, 30 per cent higher than that among whites in the rural parts,
was 67 per cent higher in the cities. In New York City the deathrate
for Negroes in 1923 was 20.85, for whites 11.25. It looks as if the
Negro were paying an unnecessarily heavy toll to the city by being
unadapted to climatic conditions, or to prevailing industries, or to
the housing available, or to all.
<p>But what has the Negro been doing about this? He has been showing
the world how a race can improve in health. His record is amazing. It
is as if the Negro had said, "Come, we will be a bigger, better und
physically more perfect race," and then had achieved it. Not long ago,
Louis I. Dublin, statistician of the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company, published facts concerning health among the two million
colored policyholders of that company; here is a group large enough to
be representative and they live chiefly in towns and cities. From 1911
to 1923Ñtwelve yearsÑthe deathrate for tuberculosis among these
policyholders fell from 418 per 100,000to 246, a startling improvement
In this same period the deathrate the Negro is not improving in
health? The four cornmunicable diseases of childhood--measles, scarlet
fever, whooping-cough and diphtheria--together show a decline of 33 per
cent; there was a drop of more than 50 per cent in the mortality rates
from diarrhea and enteritis among young colored children. The
mortality rate for colored children under fifteen years was 10.1 per
l,000 in 1911; in 1923 it was only 5.5. "Colored mothers," writes Mr.
Dublin, "have not been slow to learn how to care for and feed their
babies in accordance with the best practice of the day."
<p>Translate these figures into terms of life expectancy. In 1911 the
Negro in this country--considering the Metropolitan figures as
representative--was enjoying an average expectation of life of slightly
more than forty-one years. In 1923 he was enjoying an expectation of
nearly forty-seven years. In the short space of twelve years the Negro
added six years to the length of time he had reason to expect to live,
an astounding improvement.
<p>The Negro's life expectancy to-day is just about that of the white
people of the United States thirty or forty years ago; he is only a
generation behind. He is where a number of European countries were
just before the Great War. The mortality rate from tuberculosis is
beginning to look like that among whites only twenty years ago, when
the anti-tuberculosis campaign was begun. A race still living under
primitive conditions in many places and often from hand to mouth has
done this. "The Negro in America has proved himself thoroughly capable
of profiting from the public health campaign," says Mr. Dublin.
<p>All the more disheartening, then, are the difficulties to which
attention has been called. The Negro in the Northern city lives in
restricted areas of great congestion; he is elbowed and crowded by
people of his own and the white color; he knows the evils of bad
housing and often of bad sanitation and even squalor; he is set upon
by quacks, tricked by fake druggists, fed every form of vile nostrum
and vicious patent remedy concocted by man. "Anything is good enough
for niggers" is the motto of too many white doctors, druggists,
dentists, practitioners of all sorts who infest the colored districts
and who have deliberately flocked thither as the colored population
has grown.
<p>The Negro has come to the Northern city and the exploiter, the
conscienceless sucker of other people's welfare, has risen in his
midst.
<p>May it be as a result of these conditions that the improvement just
noted has already suffered a set-back in some cities? In Chicago in
1923 the mortality rate was 27 per cent higher than in 1921; in
Detroit it was 23 per cent higher. Has the Negro found that in health
the Northern city is inhospitable? Have congestion and other
difficulties reached a point at which they are beginning to take toll?
The effect of the Northern city upon the Negro will bear watching.
<hr>
<h4>The <i>Survey Graphic</i> Harlem Number (March 1925)</h4>
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<h4>The <i>Survey Graphic</i> Harlem Number (March 1925)</h4>
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