State Plates
The Black Population of Arizona
About 460,000 Black Arizonans — one in sixteen residents — in one of the fastest-growing Black populations of any state. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
For Arizona, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The Phoenix metropolitan area holds roughly four in five Black Arizonans — about 240,000 to 260,000 people across Maricopa County, with the detailed profile in the cities section. Tucson, the state's second metro, holds the second community: some 40,000 to 50,000 Black residents around the university and Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, at roughly 5 to 6 percent of the metro. Arizona's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
For Arizona, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. In Arizona, arizona is the growth profile of the contemporary West: a Black population whose share (one in sixteen) describes its past and whose trajectory describes its future. It is in the rows below — Arizona's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Arizona sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 5 percent — 33 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 460,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Arizona two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Arizona is legible on both readings, and this section of the atlas holds the two side by side.
Where the general meets the particular is the table of Arizona; read the two together. In Arizona's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii and Idaho. In Arizona, 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 Arizona exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Arizona, 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: 5 percent is not a sample of Black Arizona, it is Black Arizona measured against all of Arizona. In Arizona, 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 Arizona, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Arizona's Black population carries an unusually military signature, and the data show it in both directions: the installations (Luke Air Force Base in the Valley, Davis-Monthan in Tucson, Fort Huachuca in the south, the Yuma proving grounds) seed Black communities wherever they stand — Sierra Vista's share exists because of Huachuca's intelligence mission — and the veteran population they retire into the state is disproportionately Black relative to the state's share. Held against the national midpoint, Arizona's own rows say how its households stand.
Reading This Plate
In Arizona, 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 Arizona; 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 Arizona plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Arizona, 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. In Arizona, 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 Arizona, the alone share of 5 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 460,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 5% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 6.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 460,000 |
| 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.