Deaths per 1,000 live births, computed from NHGIS county birth and infant-death counts (NHGIS stopped publishing this broken out by race after 1972 — a real limit on what's public, not a gap in this page). A year is only plotted when both the birth and death counts exist for that race in that county.

Worth reading carefully: this county's non-white sample is small enough (well under a thousand births total across the whole period on file) that a computed rate here can swing wildly year to year on a single death — that's not a stable pattern, it's statistical noise, and treating it like Essex County, NJ's data (thousands of births a year) would overstate what a handful of numbers can actually support.

Worth remembering about every category on this page: none of them were ever fixed. Irish and Italian immigrants were widely excluded from "White" in the 19th and early 20th century; Hispanic identity has been reclassified by the Census more than once; today, how a Dominican American is coded can differ by which box they personally check. These labels are the specific administrative categories used at the time — real enough to shape who got what, but constructed, not fixed biological fact. That instability is itself part of the history, not a flaw in how this page reads it.

Per 10,000 population/live births, NHGIS's own pre-computed rates — no race breakdown available for this span. Read this chart alongside the one above it, not as its continuation: 1972 is where the race-specific data stops, not where this one's line "picks up" a story already in progress.

From the same decennial census data behind the Great Migration/settlement story — shown here beside the mortality trends above so you can see both at once. This is not a claim that one caused the other in this window; the two data eras barely overlap (this stops at 1960, the mortality-by-race data above starts its cleanest run around 1942). It's context, placed where you can actually see it, not a proven line of causation.