U.S. Census Office, Proportion of the Colored to the Aggregate Population (1898)

This choropleth map, published in the 1890 Statistical Atlas of the United States under the direction of Henry Gannett, depicts the percentage of  the "colored population" as a proportion of the total U.S. population. In 1890, the category of “colored” included individuals of African descent as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Indigenous peoples. Notably, the 1890 Census was the first time the government included the Indigenous population. Darker shading on the map indicates a higher proportion of people of color in a given area. As Gannett observed, “Relative to the total population, they are most abundant in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and least abundant in the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Virginias” (p. 19). The map underscores that the largest concentrations of people of color were located in the southern states, a population pattern closely tied to the region’s history of slavery, which had been abolished only a few decades earlier.