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U. S. Department of Commerce,  Bureau of the Census. Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932 (Washington, D.C., 1935) original cloth. 9 x 12”, 845pp.

Supplementing two census volumes issued before World War I - though nearly three times as long as that of 1915 - this is a treasure-trove of government-gathered information about Black Americans during the crucial period of postwar Northern “urbanization” that saw the cultural birth of the Harlem Renaissance, through the harrowing early years of the Depression. 

The statistics included age distribution, marital conditions, fertility, school attendance and “illiteracy”, family structure, infant mortality, retail business, agriculture and religious affiliation.  The volume was prepared by Charles E. Hall, the "preeminent statistician of African American life during the early twentieth century," directing "a corps of Negro clerks".