1950 Census Records: A Window to History

During the same period, the largest racial or ethnic group has changed for some states and counties, and local level results illuminate new areas of diversity across the country. Using the same Diversity Index calculation for 2020 and 2010 redistricting data, the chance that two people chosen at random will be from different racial or ethnic groups has increased to 61.1% in 2020 from 54.9% in 2010. In this format, the DI tells us the chance that two people chosen at random will be from different racial and ethnic groups. A value close to 1 indicates that almost everyone in the population has different racial and ethnic characteristics. A value of 0 indicates that everyone in the population has the same racial and ethnic characteristics. We use the Diversity Index (DI) to measure the probability that two people chosen at random will be from different racial and ethnic groups.
Other White responses, such as Canadian and Pennsylvania German, represented around 2% of the White alone and White alone or in combination populations. Detailed European responses accounted for 58.8% of the White alone and 56.1% of the White alone or in combination populations. About two-thirds of the White alone and White alone or in combination populations reported a detailed response, such as German, Irish, Lebanese or French Canadian.

Related America Counts Stories

  • Phoenix had just over 100,000 people in 1950 and ranked 99th in population among cities.
  • As our country’s demographics change and the nation becomes more multiracial, it’s important to understand the composition of the race alone and race alone or in any combination populations.
  • In the first week (April 23-May 5) of Phase 1 of the Household Pulse Survey, about 5.4% of U.S. households with school-aged children reported homeschooling .
  • 2020 Census Demographic Data Map Viewer is a web map application that includes state-, county-, and census tract-level data from the 2020 Census.
  • This calculation tells us how diverse and “diffused” the population is relative to the largest groups.

He also published a series of nonfiction books containing humorous children’s phrases (Boners and More Boners) in 1931. Theodor Seuss Geisel was born in Springfield, MA, on March 2, 1904, a short distance away from the Mulberry Street he made famous with the publication of his first children’s storybook—And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. At the time of his death on September 24, 1991, “Dr. Seuss” had sold more than 600 million copies of books that had been translated into dozens of languages for children around the world to enjoy. Children’s book author and illustrator Theodor Seuss Geisel wrote some of the most popular children’s books of all time. Theodor Seuss Geisel—better known as “Dr. Seuss”—authored some of the most popular and best-selling children’s books ever written. The whimsical world of Dr. Seuss is still so popular more than eight decades since author Theodor Seuss Geisel published his first children’s book that the U.S.

  • More detailed data for the nation, states, counties and Puerto Rico are available in our interactive data visualization.
  • The addition of a new write-in area for collecting detailed White responses was one of the improvements made to the 2020 Census race question design.
  • Fearing the film would be unpopular, movie studio executives chose these cities to debut the movie to better gauge audience reaction.
  • In this America Counts story on racial and ethnic diversity, we cross-tabulate the race and Hispanic origin statistics, as data users often do, such as with the 2020 Census redistricting tables.
  • In contrast, the District of Columbia’s Black or African American alone non-Hispanic population was 50.0% and the White alone non-Hispanic population was 34.8% in 2010, a difference of 15.2 percentage points.
  • More recently, Nike’s “Cortez” sneakers played a “supporting role” in 1994’s Academy Award-winning movie Forest Gump.

Census Records: A Window to History

The 2021 Annual Survey of Manufactures found that American footwear manufacturing establishments (NAICS 3162) had annual sales, value of shipments, or revenues of more than $1.6 billion and employed 10,379 people nationwide. Today, thousands of people in the United States continue to produce footwear for stage, screen, sports, the office, and outdoor adventures. More recently, Nike’s “Cortez” sneakers played a “supporting role” in 1994’s Academy Award-winning movie Forest Gump. More than 8 decades since the movie’s release, the sparkling red shoes still attract excited crowds to the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History in Washington, DC. The red sequined “ruby slippers” Judy Garland wore in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz are perhaps the most famous footwear in American popular culture.
For the District of Columbia, the difference in the size of the Black or African American alone non-Hispanic population (40.9%) and the White alone non-Hispanic population (38.0%) narrowed dramatically in 2020 with only a 2.9 percentage point difference. In Texas, the first- and second-most prevalent group rankings did not change between 2010 and 2020, but the difference in size between the White alone non-Hispanic population (39.7%) and the Hispanic or Latino population (39.3%) shrank to 0.4 percentage points. In Wisconsin, the Hispanic or Latino population (7.6%) became the second-most prevalent group, surpassing the Black or African American alone non-Hispanic population (6.2%). You can explore the Diversity Index for all states and counties by interacting with the data visualization.

Census Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A on America Counts

In Hawaii County, Hawaii, there was a 77.7% chance that two people chosen at random were from different racial or ethnic groups. Again, the way to interpret the DI is that there was a 73.7% chance in Prince William County, Virginia, that two people chosen at random were from different racial or ethnic groups. We explored using alternative racial and ethnic categories for our analysis but found that they did not have a substantial impact on the overall results. The most prevalent racial or ethnic group for the United States was the White alone non-Hispanic population at 57.8%. In data tables, such as the 2020 Census redistricting data tables that provide Hispanic origin by race statistics, we often cross-tabulate the race and Hispanic origin categories to display Hispanic as a single category and the non-Hispanic race groups as categories summing up to the total population. Expectations of what it means for a population to be racially and ethnically diverse may differ.
The 1950 Census might have been the last census your grandparents filled out before moving from the city to the suburbs. Aurora, Colo., meanwhile, was a small suburb of Denver with just 11,000 people. The rankings of cities by population were considerably different in 1950 prior to the trends in regional migration and suburbanization. Its population would more than quadruple to 439,000 in the next 10 years. Only three of the country’s 10 largest cities in 1950 (Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.) were in the South or West.

How Do I Access Data for My Neighborhood (tracts & blocks) from the 2020 Census Redistricting Files?

In short, the country had not yet been impacted by most of the major postwar demographic and economic trends that would greatly change the size, shape and composition of the U.S. population. In hindsight, we can now see that on many demographic fronts the U.S. population in 1950 looked more like the country in 1940 than the rapidly growing, youthful nation to come in 1960 or 1970. With little housing construction during the prior two decades, the nation’s population mostly lived in cities and rural areas, often in crowded conditions. Italian was also the largest group in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, New Haven County, Connecticut and Guaynabo Municipio, Puerto Rico.

Households and Families

The largest Italian population (360,345) was in Suffolk County, New York on Long Island. The largest Irish population (567,668) was in Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago. Maricopa County, Arizona, home to Phoenix, had the largest English and German populations of all counties in the nation (620,199 and 639,586 respectively). Louisiana had the largest French alone population (136,390), or 5.1% of its total White alone population, followed closely by California (127,756), Massachusetts (111,502), Florida (107,687) and Texas (105,770). Illinois had the largest number of people who identified as Polish alone (352,882), followed by New York (274,580), Michigan (256,398), Pennsylvania (206,264), and Florida (160,119). California had the largest Irish alone population (803,899), followed by New York (730,165) and Florida (692,142).
Census Bureau released the country’s 1,000 most common surnames by race and Hispanic origin and those that occurred 100 or more times in the 2010 Census.

The Census Bureau acts as the collection agent for these surveys, but the data themselves are available wino casino through the sponsoring agency. The Census Bureau collected data about libraries—like the public library in Universal City, Texas (pictured above)—as reimbursable projects for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). He also edited President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s official papers, served as West Virginia’s secretary of state, and served in the U.S. His 1957 book The Bridge at Remagen was made into a movie in 1969. He published the first Ilocan language translation of Don Quixote, wrote novels, plays, and founded the Ilokanos Writers Association of the Philippines.Author and historian Ken Hechler worked for the Census Bureau’s population division during the 1940 Census.
In the 2020 Census, over 235 million people reported they were White alone or in combination with another race group, such as Black or African American. The alone or in any combination population includes those who reported one or more responses to the race question such as only Austrian or Austrian and German or Austrian and Asian. The alone population includes those who reported only one response to the race question, such as Austrian. As a result, data are now available from the decennial census for 104 detailed White groups, including Lithuanian, Irish, Libyan, Syrian, Pennsylvania Dutch and Australian.
There is more variation in the map for the second-most prevalent racial or ethnic group. Figures 2 and 3 show the most and second-most prevalent racial or ethnic groups by county in 2020. In West Virginia, the Multiracial non-Hispanic population (4.0%) became the second-most prevalent group, surpassing the Black or African American alone non-Hispanic population (3.6%). This calculation tells us how diverse and “diffused” the population is relative to the largest groups.
In addition, we decided to continue using this racial and ethnic cross-tabulation because it is commonly used by the Census Bureau and other data users. These diversity calculations require the use of mutually exclusive racial and ethnic (nonoverlapping) categories. The overall racial and ethnic diversity of the country has increased since 2010, according to U.S. Today’s companion America Counts story on the overview of race and ethnicity explains that differences in overall racial distributions are largely due to design improvements in the two separate questions for race data collection and processing, as well as some demographic changes over the past 10 years.
More than 8 decades later, movie critics, adults, and children still consider The Wizard of Oz to be one of the greatest movies in film history. On August 15, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios hosted a star-studded, “official” premiere replete with searchlights, movie props, and sidewalk bleachers for fans at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, CA. Homeschooling rates are increasing across race groups and ethnicities. 2020 Census Demographic Data Map Viewer is a web map application that includes state-, county-, and census tract-level data from the 2020 Census. More racial or ethnic groups are represented and the patterns are not as tightly clustered in specific regions.
The story was much the same in Las Vegas, whose population ballooned from just over 24,000 people in 1950 to 642,000 in 2020. By 2020 Phoenix’s population would reach 1.6 million, making it the country’s fifth largest city. Phoenix had just over 100,000 people in 1950 and ranked 99th in population among cities. By 2020, the share of the county’s population in Chicago had fallen to 52%. By 1970, as suburbanization boomed, that share had slipped to 61% and Chicago’s population had declined somewhat.
But in the coming decades, nearly all increases in the metropolitan share of the population would stem from growth in the suburbs. The share of the population in metro areas was 56.1% in 1950, with 32.8% in central cities and 23.3% living in suburbs. Of the nation’s 10 largest cities in 1950, only New York and Los Angeles would have bigger populations in 2020. The Technical Documentation PDF 10.6 MB provides more information on data quality and how the Census Bureau collects, codes and tabulates statistics on race and Hispanic or Latino origin. Although there is a great deal of diversity in the detailed White groups, many of the largest groups are also broadly distributed across the United States. The county with the largest Norwegian population (135,077) was Hennepin, Minnesota, which includes Minneapolis.