Now, a widespread custom among Negro apologists is to scoff these figures away. It is said, for one thing, that there is “a relatively greater understatement of illegitimacy in the white group than in the nonwhite.” For my own part, I doubt this exceedingly. It is said, also, that a greater percentage of extramarital pregnancies are aborted among white girls than among Negro girls. Perhaps. A third line of rationalization typically has been advanced by the _Norfolk Journal and Guide_, a Negro newspaper; this has to do with the fact that slaves were not permitted to marry prior to 1865, though they were encouraged to cohabit, and “it is foolish to suppose that a suppressed and constantly vilified minority group could wholly recover from the practice in a few generations.” A related argument, if it is an argument at all, is that in pre-War times “many white slave-owners promiscuously exploited their slave women sexually.” Other rationalizations put some of the blame for Negro sexual looseness on housing, economic opportunity, low income levels, and the like. Generally, it is all charged to the “system of segregation,” a charge that tends to collapse when it is observed that the high rates of Negro illegitimacy recorded in the South are not materially different in the integrated climes of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, and West Virginia. But the basic validity of the statistics is not entirely discounted, even by Negro commentators. Carl Rowan, the Minneapolis newspaperman who came to the State Department with the New Frontier, faced up to them (after a good deal of preliminary squirming) in _Harper’s_ in 1961. A leading Negro educator, President Thomas H. Henderson of Virginia Union University, offered some thoughtful comments in a paper delivered before the Virginia Conference of Social Work in 1957. He said: “Let me begin by saying what the problem of a high illegitimacy rate among Negroes is not. It is not, first of all, a statistical illusion.... [T]he illegitimacy rate for Virginia Negroes has been ten times as high as that for whites each year for several decades. After subducting the maximum influence of all possible sources of error in the statistics, the consistency and magnitude of the differential leaves no doubt that a real and disturbing difference exists.” The problem cannot be blamed, said Dr. Henderson, on any particular desire to obtain public benefits under the program of Aid to Dependent Children. Moreover, “it is not to any great degree a problem of racial interbreeding--every indication points to a steady decrease in interbreeding since before the dawn of this century.” The problem is “overwhelmingly a problem of illegitimacy with both parents colored.” He added: