State Plates
The Black Population of Alabama
About 1.4 million Black Alabamians — more than one in four residents — span Birmingham, Montgomery, and the Black Belt counties. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
For Alabama, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Alabama holds about 1.4 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — more than one in four of its people, with Black alone at about 1.3 million, or 26 percent. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, the state's attainment on the other.
In Alabama, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The Black Belt arcs across Alabama's midsection from the Georgia line to Mississippi: a band of chalk-soil prairie counties — Wilcox, Lowndes, Dallas (whose seat is Selma), Greene, Sumter, Marengo, Hale, Perry, and their neighbors — where enslaved majorities worked the cotton economy and where Black majorities, in several counties exceeding 70 percent, persist today. Held against the national midpoint, Alabama's own rows say how its households stand.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Alabama sits in the 20 to 29 percent band. Its Black alone share of 26 percent — 7 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 1.4 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads a state two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the state's own population. Alabama is legible on both readings, and this section of the atlas holds the two side by side.
The company a state keeps on the map is set by the legend's bands. In Alabama's band — the 20 to 29 percent band — the shaded peers include Delaware, North Carolina and South Carolina. Banding is a cartographer's compromise: it trades precision for pattern, letting the eye take in the geography of a whole country at once. The table restores the precision the shading rounds away, carrying the published share and count for Alabama exactly as the source agency releases them.
Every figure on this plate descends from the federal count of the whole population — the decennial census and the American Community Survey that updates it between census years. Those instruments count everyone, which is what makes a share meaningful: 26 percent is not a sample of Black Alabama, it is Black Alabama measured against all of Alabama. The atlas's other plates return to this population again and again, because income, schooling, health, and ownership are all attributes of the people counted here, in this place, first.
In Alabama, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Alabama's state average, like Georgia's, blends regimes: a rural Black Belt at the hard end of the national distributions, three mid-sized metros in the middle, and one booming technology region. General material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
For Alabama, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The county profiles beneath this state account — Jefferson, Montgomery, Mobile, Madison, and the Black Belt counties among them — provide the local figures for each of the regions described above. The plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
Reading This Plate
Read the table from the top: the share first, because the share is what the map shades; then the count, because the count is what the share is made of. Shares and counts answer different questions. The share says how present Black life is in the everyday population of Alabama; the count says how much of Black America lives there. Both are published figures, rounded as the source agency publishes them, and both are the ground every other Alabama plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. The Black alone count holds residents who marked Black and no other race; the alone-or-in-combination count adds residents who marked Black alongside another race. The second is the larger and the more inclusive, and the gap between them is itself a fact about the place — widest where multiracial identification is most common, narrowest where it is rare. For Alabama, the alone share of 26 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 1.4 million carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 26% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 28% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.4 Million |
| Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination (Census Bureau population estimates) | 52.8 million |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.