[5] Only the majority-minority states of Hawaii, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas have a smaller percentage of non-Hispanic whites.
[8] The top reported ancestries of white Marylanders are: German (15.7%), Irish (11.4%), English (8.5%), American (6.7%), Italian (5.7%), Polish (3.1%), French (2.9%), Dutch (1.5%), Norwegian (1.5%), Scottish (1.8%), Swedish (1.3%), Scotch-Irish (1.1%), and Russian (1%).
Smaller white ethnic groups include French-Canadians (0.7%), Welsh (0.6%), Arabs (0.5%), Czechs (0.5%), Danish (0.5%), Hungarians (0.5%), Portuguese (0.5%), Greeks (0.4%), Swiss (0.3%), Ukrainians (0.3%), Lithuanians (0.2%), and Slovaks (0.2%).
[10] In 1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano, sailing under the French flag, passed the mouth of Chesapeake Bay.
The region was depicted in a map by Estêvão Gomes and Diego Gutiérrez, made in 1562, in the context of the Spanish Ajacán Mission of the sixteenth century.
[16] In 1999, Maryland was home to at least a dozen white-supremacist hate groups, including the World Church of the Creator, six chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, the Baltimore branch of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, an Abingdon-based skinhead fraternity known as the Hammerskin Nation, and an Edgewater-based neo-Nazi group called SS Regalia.
The KKK had a strong presence in rural Western and Central Maryland in counties such as Carroll, Frederick, Howard, and Washington.
The oldest KKK affiliate in Maryland is the Invincible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, with chapters in Frederick and Washington counties, and which held intermittent rallies in Annapolis.
The American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan faction, with chapters in Clinton, Timonium, and Rising Sun, also held rallies in Annapolis during the 1990s.