MEN OF COLOUR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19844, 19 May 1927, Page 11

MEN OF COLOUR

NEGROES IN AMERICA ARE THEY DECREASING IN NUMBER? Basing his assumption on the fact that relatively the negro population has been decreasing for twenty years in the United Stu.es, Professor Frank 11. Hankins, of the Department of Sociology of Smith College, said recently that in time the negro population of the United States bids fair to disappear, slates the New York Times. Professor Baukins made this prophecy at a luncheon at the Hotel Woodstock before members of the Conference on Immigration Policy during a discussion of the National Origins Clause of the present Immigration law. Max F. Kohler, a lawyer who for several years has been interested in immigration, asked Professor Hankins, who had spoken in favour of the national origins plan under the quota law, if the restriction of immigration had not resulted in such a lack of labour that ,ho negro population was spreading in the North in a manner that increased the problem of the negro. “The negro population in the Northern industrial centres and cities does not reproduce itself, ” Professor Hankins said. “As he conics in contact with hardier stocks and in the more strenuous life of the city and industrial community as compared to the smaller communities in the South there is » high death rate jind an apparent loss of fecundity among the negroes. / “Relatively, the negro has been on the decrease in population for twenty years. Between the years 1910 and 1920 the negro population increased only 650,000, while the rest of the population, leaving out immigration, increased at the rato of a million and ahalf a year. “By 1935, according to present indication, I believe the negro population of the United States will be decreasing absolutely, and I think that thi« will go on until as a separate population ihe negro will have eased to bo a factor of importance.”