Census data · 1900–2020

Buffalo by the Decade

A century of arrival, departure, and return, told in two charts: who lived in Buffalo, and where its immigrants came from. Hover any decade for the story behind the numbers.

I. Who Lived Here

The city's population by race, census by census, 1900 to 2020. The top edge of the stack traces Buffalo's total population: the immigrant boom, the 1950 peak of 580,132, the long deindustrial slide, and the first gain in 70 years in 2020.

● Hover or tap a decade to read what happened and why
White Black Asian Other / two or more races
Buffalo's total population peaked at 580,132 in 1950, then fell by more than half. The white population fell from roughly 543,000 in 1950 to 131,000 in 2020 while the Black population grew from 37,000 to about 102,000.

II. Where They Came From

Behind the white band above sits a story of nations. This chart is an approximate reconstruction of Buffalo's foreign-born residents by country of birth through the immigration era, 1900 to 1970, from German Buffalo's height to the quota laws that ended it all.

A historical reconstruction. Figures are approximate and rounded; the shape is the story, not the last digit. Details in the notes below.
Germany Poland Italy Ireland Canada All other countries
Buffalo's foreign-born population peaked around 122,000 in 1920 and fell below 44,000 by 1970. Germans were the largest group in 1900; Poles became the largest by 1920; the Italian-born community peaked around 1930.
Notes on the data & how to read these charts

About the race categories

Chart I uses race-alone counts that sum to the city total. The Census Bureau treats Hispanic origin as an ethnicity crossing all races, so it is not a separate band; Buffalo was 12.3% Hispanic in 2020. Multiracial responses were first allowed in 2000. Pre-1940 Asian and "other" counts are near zero and lightly estimated. Figures for 1900–1990 follow Census working paper twps0076; 2000–2020 follow the decennial censuses.

Foreign-born, not ancestry

Chart II counts people born abroad, not ethnic communities. By 1930 roughly 20,000 Buffalonians were born in Italy, but another 45,000 had at least one Italian-born parent. Multiply that pattern across every group: ethnic Buffalo was always several times larger than the foreign-born bands shown.

The Poland problem

Poland did not exist as a state from 1795 to 1918, so the 1900 and 1910 censuses counted Polish-born immigrants under Germany, Austria, and Russia. Figures for those two decades are estimates reconstructed from parish and community records. From 1920 on, Poland appears in the census directly. Chart II values are rounded to the nearest 500 and shown with a tilde because tabulations of the era disagree at the margins; the trends and rankings are well documented.