ABSTRACT
"No other class," wrote the Reverend John Parkman, President of the Home for Aged Colored Women in 1866, "struggles for a livelihood under so many disadvantages.”In the free States," wrote Dr. Jarvis in explicating the census, "there is one lunatic or idiot among every 162.4 of the colored inhabitants. While in the slave States, there is only one in every 1558 of the colored people. Bostonians in 1845 sent a memorial to Congress protesting that the census had grossly overstated the number of deaf, dumb and blind in Massachusetts. In 1850, J. D. B. DeBow, the Superintendent of the federal census, put the number of blacks in poorhouses in Massachusetts at eighty-nine: forty-three males and forty-six females; in 1855 the number was only forty-four, and in 1860 forty-three. Based on the burden of insanity among blacks disclosed by the Sixth Census, this was exactly the case.
