Talk:Demographics of Minneapolis

Dakota tribes, mostly the Mdewakanton, occupied the area of present-day Minneapolis near their sacred site, St. Anthony Falls.^[5] European Americans pushed west. In the late 1840s,^[6] new settlers came from Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.^[7] French-Canadians came about this same time, becoming laborers in lumber milling and logging.^[8] Farmers from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania began secondary migration. Despite being a small fraction of the populace, settlers from New England had an outsized influence on civic life in Minneapolis.^[9]

While few then lived in the state year around, migrant workers from Mexico came to Minnesota as early as 1860.^[10] After farming practices were mechanized, and for about thirty years, Saint Paul attracted the Twin Cities's Latinos to its meatpacking plants; then the number of Latinos in Minneapolis increased until it surpassed Saint Paul around 2000.^[10] Latinos settled in the city's Phillips, Whittier, Longfellow and Northeast neighborhoods.^[11] In 2006, the Lake Street corridor in Minneapolis had 250^[12] Hispanic-owned businesses and two shopping malls.^[13] Along with Native Americans, they historically have been undercounted by the US Census,^[14] but clearly, just before the turn of the 21st century, Latinos were the state's largest group of immigrants,^[10] as well as the fastest growing.^[15]

As populations outgrew Scandinavia,^[16] settlers from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark arrived from the mid-1860s through the 1880s.^[17] After the Civil War, Irish, Scots and English also immigrated.^[18] Norwegians and Swedes found harmony in the Republican and Protestant belief systems of the migrants from New England who preceded them.^[19] They founded Sons of Norway and the Lutheran Brotherhood, now Thrivent, in the city around the turn of the century.^[20]

Primarily Catholic, Germans followed at the end of the 19th century; they had to overcome restrictions arising from World War I.^[21] Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia began arriving in the 1880s and settled primarily on the north side before moving to western suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s.^[22] Italians and Greeks first came to Minneapolis in the 1890s and 1900s, with Italians peaking at over two thousand in 1930, and Greeks never reaching more than a thousand immigrants.^[23][24] From 1880 until 1930 when the city evicted them to build coal docks, Slovak and Czech immigrants lived in the Bohemian Flats alongside the Mississippi's west bank.^[25] After 1900, Ukrainians arrived, settling for the most part with Poles on the river's east bank.^[26] Polish Catholics wished to maintain their culture and disagreed with Irish Catholics who believed in Americanization.^[27] Central European migrants settled in the Northeast neighborhood, which is still known for its Polish, Ukrainian, Czech and Italian cultural heritage.^[28]

Facing under President Chester A. Arthur the first-ever US government ban of a specific ethnic group,^[29] Chinese began immigration in the 1870s.^[30] Minneapolis had no Chinatown, and Chinese businesses centered on the Gateway District and Glenwood Avenue.^[31] From 1880 until the 1950s, and again in the 1970s, Westminster Presbyterian Church gave language classes and support for Chinese Americans in Minneapolis, many of whom had fled discrimination in western states.^[32] A small number of Japanese lived in the Twin Cities before World War II.^[33] After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, US-government relocations began on the west coast.^[33] Moved from San Francisco, Japanese Americans worked for Camp Savage, a secret military Japanese-language school that trained interpreters and translators, that was easier for relatives to access from Minneapolis than from Saint Paul.^[34] Some resettled temporarily at a Lutheran hostel on Clifton Avenue.^[34] After the war, some Japanese and Japanese Americans remained in Minneapolis and in 1970, they numbered nearly two thousand—at the time, part of the state's largest Asian-American ethnic group.^[35]

During the late 1970s, the first Filipinos arrived to attend the University of Minnesota.^[36] Despite the special case of the Philippines being a former American colony, discrimination against Asians continued.^[37] Harmon Place was one of the few locations in Minneapolis with housing open to Filipinos.^[38] Koreans came starting around 1969.^[39] Escaping after the Vietnam War, and arriving around 1975,^[40] Vietnamese, Hmong, Lao, and Cambodians settled primarily in Saint Paul, but some businesses, student associations, and churches formed in Minneapolis.^[41] Chia Youyee Vang explains that since 1998, both Saint Paul, where organizers claim to promote tradition, and Minneapolis, where Americanization is evident, hold large, independent, even competing, Hmong New Year celebrations, drawing crowds from the Hmong diaspora.^[42] People from Tibet, Burma, and Thailand came to Minnesota in the 1990s and 2000s.^[43] The state's population of people from India nearly doubled between 2000 and 2010.^[44]

During the 1950s, the US government relocated Native Americans to cities like Minneapolis, attempting to do away with Indian reservations.^[45]

The population of Minneapolis grew until 1950 when the census peaked at 521,718—the only time it has exceeded a half million. The population then declined for decades; after World War II, people moved to the suburbs, and generally out of the Midwest.^[46]

Migrating from Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois, eight Black families lived in Minneapolis in 1857.^[47] In 1889, the first Black physician moved to the city from Chicago.^[48] In 1899, the first Black representative was elected to the Minnesota legislature.^[48] In 1910, Minneapolis had 2,500 or so Black residents.^[49] In 1930, Minneapolis Blacks were among the nation's most literate (1.7 percent of Blacks over 10 years of age could not read and write, compared to the national average of 16.3 percent).^[50] Nevertheless, discrimination against Blacks excluded them from all but the lowest paying jobs.^[47] Real estate covenants created ghettos and gradually forced Blacks to live in certain areas such as the Near North and Seven Corners.^[51] In 1935, Cecil Newman and the Minneapolis Spokesman led a year-long consumer boycott of four area breweries— Hamm's, Gluek, Schmidt and Grain Belt—that refused to hire Blacks.^[52] Employment, but not housing, improved during World War II, when more favorable conditions emerged at about a dozen Twin Cities businesses including Honeywell, Northwest Airlines, and Munsingwear.^[53]

Between 1950 and 1970, the Black population of Minneapolis increased by 436 percent,^[52] but because of discrimination, in 1970, the average Black male earned USD 1,000 less per year than his White counterpart.^[54] Resentful that they did not share in the era's prosperity, Blacks in Minneapolis, as in other cities, rebelled with civil disorder in the 1960s.^[54] After the Rust Belt economy declined during the early 1980s, Minnesota's Black population, a large fraction of whom arrived from cities such as Chicago and Gary, Indiana, nearly tripled in less than twenty years.^[55] Black migrants were drawn to Minneapolis and the Greater Twin Cities by its abundance of jobs, good schools, and relatively safe neighborhoods. Beginning in the 1990s, immigrants came from the Horn of Africa, especially Somalia;^[56] however, Somali immigration slowed considerably after a 2017 executive order from President Donald Trump.^[57] As of 2019, more than 20,000 Somalis live in Minneapolis.^[58] As of 2020, African Americans make up about one fifth of the city's population.^[59] A Black family in Minneapolis earns less than half as much per year as a White family.^[60] Black people own their homes at one-third the rate of White families.^[60] Specifically, the median income for a Black family was $36,000 in 2018, about $47,000 less than for a white family. Black Minneapolitans thus earn about 44 percent per year compared to White Minneapolitans, one of the country's largest income gaps.^[60]

In 2020 based on Gallup data, UCLA's Williams Institute reported the Twin Cities had an estimated LGBT adult population of 4.2%, the 18th-highest number of LGBT residents of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the US, and did not rank by percent.^[61] Human Rights Campaign gave Minneapolis its highest-possible score in 2022.^[62]