North Carolina : Demographics

White population of North Carolina consists mostly of descendants of English settlers who arrived in the east in the 17th and early 18th centuries and from Scottish, Scots-Irish, and German immigrants who settled into the piedmont in the middle of the 18th century. These groups l formed a homogenous body of native-born white Protestants by the first half of the 19th century. By 1860, North Carolina had the lowest proportion of foreign-born whites of any state. However, by the next decade, the foreign-born population increased dramatically, to 430,000 (5.3%) in 2000. In the same year, the estimated Hispanic and Latino population was 378,963 (4.7% of the state total), up from 161,000 (2.1%) in 1990.

According to the 2000 federal census there were some 99,551 Native Americans (including Eskimos and Aleuts) living in North Carolina, the 6th-largest number in any state, and the largest number in any state east of the Mississippi.

North Carolina consisted of 1, 737,545 blacks making up of  21.6% of its total population in 2000. Black slaves came to North Carolina from the 17th century through the early 19th. Although black slaves performed a wide variety of tasks and they were mostly engaged as field laborers on the large farms in the eastern region. The distribution of black population today still reflects the patterns of plantation agriculture. The coastal plain contains a much higher than average concentration of black inhabitants

In 2000 North Carolina's Asian population numbered 113,689, including 26,197 Asian Indians, 18,984 Chinese, 15,596 Vietnamese, 12,600 Koreans, 9,592 Filipinos, and 7,093 Hmong. Pacific Islanders numbered 3,983.