In this context, the obituaries for poet Paul Dunbar offer an interesting basis for comparing the treatment of African American victims. Obituary for Dunbar, Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 10, 1906, from Chronicling America
Although some obituaries celebrated the achievements of black Americans who died due to consumption, like Dunbar, such articles were not as prevalent as those about white Americans’ life accomplishments. If newspapers did describe the victim’s race, it was usually “colored.” These obituaries often expressed a seemingly negative tone, mentioning that the individuals were either convicts or social failures. Most newspaper obituaries omitted the racial identities of the victims. We thus found interpreting race and ethnicity using newspaper sources to be a challenging process. Because minorities were more likely to be underrepresented in healthcare and news reporting, African American, Asian American, Native American, Latino, and Hispanic groups appeared relatively infrequently in newspaper obituaries. While the white population had the largest reported number of tuberculosis deaths, the disease’s rapaciousness varied for minorities. Understanding how death rates from consumption varied by race situates Dunbar’s death in a broader historical context. Such low representation proved a disparity in the racial hierarchy that coincided with the unequal socioeconomic trends of the time period. However, despite these high death rates, the nonwhite population accounted for only 9.3 percent of the total cases we came across. The chart clearly illustrates the higher death rates for people of color, as compared to the white population. Figure 1 represents the 1890 census death records of registered cities across the United States by gender and race. The scope and type of information gathered about victims required additional analysis to uncover and interpret racial and ethnic disparities. Resultsĭeath rates from consumption, by race and gender As will be discussed in a subsequent blog by our collaborators, the biggest challenge we faced was using this data to provide meaningful insights into the ways that Americans experienced this disease. We discovered more than 6,000 individual victims identified by newspaper obituaries as having died from consumption. While gathering large amounts of death data can be a daunting process, what we can do with that data is exciting. Our research team entered data about individual victims that included personal information (name, date of birth and death, gender, age, race/ethnicity), geographic data (place of birth, death, and residence), disease/health history (length of illness, description of death), familial connections (parents, spouse, siblings, children), and place in society (occupation, associations, religion).
We narrowed our search to the words “died” and “consumption” within 50 words of one another, which yielded more than 40,000 results from more than 40 newspaper titles across the United States. Our methods involved browsing through online archives of newspapers printed between 18 that were accessible through Chronicling America from the Library of Congress and commercial databases available through our university libraries. Research MethodsĬhronicling America search protocol, included search terms (died and consumption), state, newspaper title, and date range Using both traditional and nonconventional historical methods of inquiry, our analysis explored the intersection between race and tuberculosis and asked how African Americans, like Dunbar, and other minorities experienced tuberculosis. Taking advantage of online newspaper archives, we built and analyzed an online dataset of tuberculosis deaths to measure, visualize, and narrate the stories of lives lost to consumption. Although his case was not unique in age, length of illness, or even cause of death, Dunbar’s fame as an African American poet and the reporting on his death are unique in their capacity to illustrate consumption’s effect on society at the turn of the 20th century. Tuberculosis was the single greatest cause of death between 18, claiming three to four million estimated lives in the United States, including Dunbar’s. On February 9, 1906, at the age of 33, Paul Laurence Dunbar died at his home in Dayton, Ohio, of consumption (the common name for tuberculosis in this era). Paul Laurence Dunbar, African American poet.
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