application, it must, upon his request, give him a certificate of the regular examining physician, saying that the refusal was not because the applicant is a person of color, but solely upon the grounds of general health and prospect of longevity as would be applicable to white persons of the same age and sex.
The Connecticut statute enacts that any condition or stipulation in the policy, inserted because of the color or race of the insured, shall be void. Ohio provides that any corporation, or officer or agent of such corporation, violating the provisions of its statute, shall be fined for each offence not less than one hundred dollars nor more than two hundred dollars, but that nothing in the act shall be construed as to require any agent or company to take or receive the application for insurance of any person. New York makes the violation of the law a misdemeanor punishable by a fine of from fifty dollars to five hundred dollars. Michigan goes a step further and declares that anyone violating the law shall forfeit to the State five hundred dollars, to be recovered by the attorney general, and that any officer or agent who violates it shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and punished by imprisonment in the county jail not over one year or by a fine of from fifty dollars to five hundred dollars, or both.
There must have been instances of discrimination by life insurance companies against Negroes, else these States would not have thought it necessary to enact such statutes. The explanation of this discrimination is probably not so much race prejudice as the general belief, based upon statistics, that the Negro, particularly in the colder climate of the North and West, has not the same hope of longevity
