State House News Service graphic

The 2020 decennial U.S. Census painted a portrait of a diversifying Massachusetts, and those changes stretched far beyond the state’s burgeoning urban centers to touch nearly every single municipality from Salisbury to Sheffield.

Every single city and town in the Bay State except for one – Aquinnah – saw its share of white residents as a percentage of the local population decrease from 2010 to 2020, matched by corresponding increases in the share of residents identifying as Black, Hispanic or Latino, Asian or some other racial demographic, according to data Census Bureau officials released last week.

That nearly universal trend carried through cities where people of color already represented a majority of the population, small towns far whiter than the statewide average, and suburban communities rapidly becoming more multicultural.

Massachusetts had 13 municipalities where non-white residents outnumbered white residents in the 2020 Census, five more than it did after the 2010 Census. The white share of the local population dropped below 50 percent in Everett, Lowell, Malden, Revere and Worcester over the past decade.

With that change, white residents are now a minority of the population in six of the state’s 10 most populous cities: Boston, Worcester, Springfield, Lowell, Brockton and Lynn.

Fall River, which is about 71 percent white, is the only city in that top 10 list that is less diverse than Massachusetts as a whole.

And many smaller communities that were once homogenous have also undergone substantial transformation as the currents of demographic change swirl.

Take Hopkinton, a 28-square-mile MetroWest community perhaps best known as the starting point for the Boston Marathon, as an example. More than nine out of 10 of its residents were white in 2010, and the Census Bureau that year counted 654 town residents who identified as Asian.

Over the ensuing decade, the town’s Asian population exploded to about 3,300, a more than 400 percent increase. That rapid expansion helped Hopkinton’s overall population grow by more than a quarter since 2010, even as the town’s total number of white residents remained virtually flat.