State Plates

Movement and Change: Black Alabama

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Alabama — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 1.4 million, alone or in combination, 26 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

The migration currents read locally in Alabama, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Birmingham, the state's largest metro, holds its largest Black population: the city itself is more than two-thirds Black — roughly 68 percent — and the metro's Black residents number in the several hundred thousands, suburbanized increasingly into the surrounding counties. Montgomery, the capital, is roughly three-fifths Black and home to Alabama State University; its Black population carries the dual history of the Confederacy's first capital and the modern movement's first great victory, a juxtaposition the census maps in a city of 200,000. An atlas benchmark earns its place by locating Alabama, never by ranking it.

The migration currents read locally in Alabama, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Alabama's institutional signature is its historically Black colleges: about fourteen, the most of any state — Tuskegee University, founded by Booker T. Locating Alabama is the benchmark's purpose; ranking it is not.

The migration currents read locally in Alabama, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. The estimates describe a Black Alabama that is stable in share and slow-growing in count: natural increase offset by modest net out-migration to Georgia and Texas, an age structure older than the growth states', and a foreign-born share among the nation's smallest — a deep-rooted, native-born population in the same pattern as Mississippi's. The point of the benchmark is position: where Alabama stands, stated before anything is made of it.

The National Movement Around the State

Black movement in the present era runs in several directions at once: out of the largest older metros, toward the South and its suburbs, and into mid-sized cities whose Black populations are growing fastest in percentage terms. Alabama, in the South, sits inside that wider current. The decennial counts and the survey estimates between them are the instruments that register the change; each new release revises the picture at the margin, and the direction of the lines — which places gain, which hold, which thin — is the story this plate is built to tell for Alabama.

Movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. Natural increase adds births and subtracts deaths inside the state. Domestic migration moves residents between states — the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies for a century and a half. International migration adds residents born abroad, a stream that has reshaped the Black populations of the largest gateway metros and, increasingly, of states well beyond them. For Alabama, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.

For Alabama, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national ladder, and the attainment recorded in Alabama.

In Alabama, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. The midpoint is the reference; Alabama's own rows give the standing of its households.

The atlas gives this subject its own plate — Movement and Change: Black Alabama — because the published record supports one. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 26%; Black share, alone or in combination: 28%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.4 Million. What the sources publish, the plate reports; what they do not, it leaves alone.

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.

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