Gannet, Henry 1894

The data visualizations below are recreated versions of ones found in the 1894 publication, Statistics of the Negroes in the United States, by Henry Gannett. They represent only a portion of the data and data visualizations available in the report, which you can read in full here: https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbaapc.10601/?sp=1&st=gallery. The document was an "occasional paper" funded by the Slater Fund, a financial endowment established in 1882 by John Fox Slater, a Connecticut textiles manufacturer, to support the industrial and vocational higher education of newly freed African Americans in the South, with an early emphasis on training teachers. The preface to the document states that the Fund would "publish from time to time papers that relate to the education of the colored race. " By the time the fund ceased operations in 1937, it had disbursed about $4,000,000.

Henry Gannett, who wrote the report, was a geographer for the U.S. Censuses of 1880, 1890, and 1900 and a driving force behind the data visualizations in the Statistical Atlases of the United States from those same years. The report is valuable for the statistics and data visualizations it provides, but is also laden with language reflecting the racist views of the time. For example, Gannett writes at length about the different rates of growth in the white and Black populations, stating, "These figures, and the conclusions necessarily derived from them, should set at rest forever all fears regarding any possible conflict between the two races. We have before us the testimony of a century to show us that the negroes, while in no danger of extinction, while increasing at a rate probably more rapid than in any other part of the earth, are yet increasing less rapidly than the white people of the country, and to demonstrate that the latter will become more and more numerically the dominant race in America" (pp. 6-7). In another section of the paper, Gannett comments on how the rate of increase in urban centers has been slower for Blacks than whites, stating, "While the negro is extremely gregarious and is by that instinct drawn toward the great centers of population, on the other hand he is not fitted either by nature or education for those vocations for the pursuit of which men collect in cities, that is, for manufactures and commerce. The inclinations of this race, drawn from its inheritance, tend to keep it wedded to the soil, and the probabilities are that as cities increase in these states in number and size, and with them manufactures and commerce develop, the great body of the negroes will continue to remain aloof from them and cultivate the soil as heretofore" (p. 12).

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