ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Halfway through the extended effort to count every U.S. resident, civil rights leaders worry that minority communities are falling behind in responding to the 2020 census.

With outreach efforts to motivate minority responses upended by a global pandemic, both the National Urban League and the NALEO Educational Fund are sounding the alarm that communities with concentrations of Blacks and Hispanics have been trailing the rest of the nation in answering the census questionnaire.

A more detailed analysis of response rates in late May and early June conducted by the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center showed that neighborhoods with concentrations of Black residents had a self-response rate of 51%, compared to 53.8% for Hispanic-concentrated neighborhoods and 65.5% for White-dominant neighborhoods.

The Census Bureau already plans to send out as many as 500,000 workers this summer and fall to the homes of people who haven’t responded, but the league’s president and CEO, Marc Morial, says it must do more — hiring still more door-knockers, targeting more advertising to minority communities and mailing out another round of paper questionnaires.

With the new coronavirus spreading, the Census Bureau suspended field operations in mid-March for a month and a half, including efforts to drop off census forms at households in rural areas with no traditional addresses.

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