ABSTRACT
A considerable number of cliche views about blacks have become part of the popular wisdom accepted as dogma by scholar and layman alike. Matters that engage the attention of specialists in the black studies field generally present no difficulty to laymen and scholars competent in other fields; to them, facts, and their meaning, appear obvious. The high death rates of the colonial period were largely the result of smallpox and other epidemic diseases "which seem to have been particularly fatal to the black population." The emigrant status of the black population which unnaturally skewed the age and sex composition of the community together with the consequences of racism produced, in the same population aggregate, the seeming anomaly of excessive mortality combined with good, better than average, longevity. The data presented on black mortality in antebellum Boston documents the oft repeated sociological cliché about excessive mortality among the lower orders and among blacks in particular.
