How many black people lived in the Netherlands in 1955
Executive summary
Direct answers to “How many Black people lived in the Netherlands in 1955” cannot be produced from the available reporting because there are no official historical tallies in these sources; modern estimates put the contemporary Afro‑Dutch population in the hundreds of thousands, but those figures reflect post‑1955 migration waves and cannot be retroactively applied without further archival data [1] [2] [3].
1. The question being asked and the evidence gap
The user asks for a single historical count for 1955, but the sources supplied and cited here make clear that Dutch authorities and social researchers do not publish a simple “Black population in 1955” figure: ENAR’s briefing explicitly notes there are no official figures on the size of People of African Descent / Black Europeans in the Netherlands and that available estimates are constructed from registrations of people from Africa and former colonies rather than a race category in census records [1].
2. What the demographic context shows about 1955 population levels
The Netherlands’ total population grew from roughly 10.11 million in 1950 toward about 15.92 million by 2000, reflecting demographic change across the second half of the twentieth century [4]; this broad national growth signal does not, however, identify the racial or ancestral composition in 1955, and the modern size of Afro‑Dutch communities stems largely from later migration waves, not a continuous, well‑documented Black population in the 1950s [3].
3. Modern numbers and why they don’t answer 1955
Contemporary sources commonly cite an Afro‑Dutch population on the order of a few hundred thousand—some references state approximately 500,000 Afro‑Dutch people today and others estimate Black or People‑of‑African‑Descent communities at a range of a few percent of the national total—figures that reflect migrations from Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean and Africa mostly concentrated in the post‑1970s era [2] [3] [5] [1]. Because those movements occurred decades after 1955, they cannot serve as direct evidence of the size of the Black population in that specific year [3].
4. Historical presence is documented but numerically sparse
Historical scholarship documents that Black people were present in the Netherlands from the early modern period—research cites several dozens in seventeenth‑century Amsterdam and episodes such as the arrival of roughly 100 Africans in Middelburg in 1596—yet these records speak to presence and social history, not a comprehensive mid‑twentieth‑century population count [6] [7]. Such episodic records underline a long history but do not fill the statistical void for 1955.
5. What can and cannot be responsibly concluded
From the supplied sources it is responsible to conclude only that: (a) no official, widely cited 1955 figure for “Black people in the Netherlands” is present in these reports [1]; (b) the sizable Afro‑Dutch communities visible today are largely the product of later migration from Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean, and African countries [3] [2]; and (c) scholarly and advocacy materials provide modern percentage estimates (roughly under 4% to about 5.4% in different analyses) but these apply to recent decades, not to 1955 [5] [1]. Any specific numeric claim for 1955 would require archival census tables or migration registers not included among the provided sources.
6. Alternative sources and next steps for a definitive number
To obtain a definitive 1955 count would require consulting Dutch historical census data and migration records—national statistics from CBS (Statistics Netherlands) or archival census tabulations for 1955 that classify origin or ethnicity, plus contemporary scholarly reconstructions of mid‑century immigrant populations; the present reporting does not supply those primary historical tabulations [4] [1].