This volume is unique in that never before in the history of the Bureau of the Census has it devoted a whole volume to statistics bearing on the Negro. This work, moreover, is more important than the average census report in that it covers a period of 125 years. The compiler has used not only previously published documents but various unpublished schedules, tables and manuscripts which give this work a decidedly historical value. Never before has the public been given so many new figures concerning the development and progress of the Negroes in this country. It is a cause of much satisfaction then that these facts are available so that many questions which have hitherto been puzzling because of the lack of such statistics may now be easily cleared up. What the work comprehends is interesting. It is a statistical account of the "growth of the Negro population from decade to decade; its geographical distribution at each decennial enumeration; its migratory drift westward in the early decades of the last century, when Negroes and whites were moving forward into the East and West South Central States as cultivators of virgin soil; its drift northward and cityward, and in more recent decades southward out of the "black belt," in response to the universal gravity pull of complex economic and social forces; its widespread dispersion on the one hand, and on the other its segregation with reference to the white population; its sex and age composition and marital condition; its fertility, as indicated by the proportion of children to women of child-bearing age in different periods--again, under social conditions varying from the irresponsible relations of slavery to the more exacting institutions of freedom; its intermixture with other races, as shown by the increase in the proportion mulatto; its annual mortality in the registration area; its educational progress since emancipation, in so far as it can be measured by elementary schooling and by increasing literacy; its criminality, dependency, and physical and mental defectiveness--those characteristics of individual degeneracy which Negroes manifest in common with other racial classes in all civilized communities; finally, its economic progress, as indicated by increasing ownership of homes, by entrance into skilled trades and professions, and primarily and fundamentally by the rapid development of Negro agriculture."