Frederick L. Hoffman

At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick L. Hoffman was the chief statistician for the Prudential Insurance Company. Hoffman fervently believed in the truth of statistics, that they were unalloyed, objective, value-free measures of the phenomena they measured. While he marshaled statistical data from the 1890 Census and other data sources that showed high rates of tuberculosis, alcoholism, and prostitution and other markers of criminal behavior for African Americans, he wrongly attributed these behaviors to Black biological and moral inferiority. Hoffman was a racist. Unfortunately, his ideologically misshapen interpretation, which ignored the social conditions (and social abandonment) African Americans were subjected to, swayed at least a generation of policy makers, foundations, and social workers to deny essential social and health services to densely packed, Black-segregated urban ghettos.