Bingo....also, in 1961 a person born to a black person would have their race listed as negro....not african
There's no particular reason for that, but "white" and "Caucasion" have also been in use, and they'll use that term "Caucasion" even if none of your ancestors came from anywhere near the Caucasus mountains.
In areas where "colored" was common they wouldn't use "Cauc" on a dare!
It's been fairly recently that the government started imposing standard versions on everyone ~ they've dropped that Caucasion thing entirely ~ anyone notice? You'all "white" now.
I've noticed in early census documents many of the census takers carefully differentiated between "white" and "nonwhite" and "colored" even though only "white" and "Negro" or "black" were authorized. To some degree native white census takers were obviously describing recent immigrants as "colored", even if they were obviously German speaking people.
Hawaii is special. Everybody of every kind more or less lives there. They even use special terms for white folk