State Plates
The Black Population of Arkansas
About 490,000 Black Arkansans — one in six residents — from Little Rock and Pine Bluff to the Delta counties across the river from Mississippi. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
The distribution reads at state scale in Arkansas, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Arkansas holds about 490,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in six of its people, with Black alone at about 453,000, or 15 percent. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Arkansas stands so the plate can be read.
For Arkansas, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The eastern tier of counties along the Mississippi — Chicot, Desha, Phillips, Lee, St. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Arkansas's households on the other.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Arkansas sits in the 12 to 19 percent band. Its Black alone share of 15 percent — 14 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 490,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Arkansas two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Arkansas is legible on both readings, and this section of the atlas holds the two side by side.
In Arkansas, the company a state keeps on the map is set by the legend's bands. In Arkansas's band — the 12 to 19 percent band — the shaded peers include Florida, Illinois, Michigan and New Jersey. In Arkansas, 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 Arkansas exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Arkansas, 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: 15 percent is not a sample of Black Arkansas, it is Black Arkansas measured against all of Arkansas. In Arkansas, 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.
For Arkansas, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The city's place in the national record — the 1957 crisis at Central High School, when the Little Rock Nine's enrollment became the school-desegregation era's defining confrontation — fixed its Black community in the nation's civic memory. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Arkansas's attainment on the other.
The distribution reads at state scale in Arkansas, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Arkansas's Black indicators sit at the difficult end of the national distributions, reflecting the Delta's weight: income and poverty figures among the hardest in this reference's state tables, health outcomes carrying the Delta's burden in the public health data, and educational attainment lifted by the Little Rock metro toward — but not to — national Black averages. Not to rank Arkansas but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
The subject here is The Black Population of Arkansas, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 15%; Black share, alone or in combination: 16.3%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 490,000. The plate states Arkansas's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The Black Population of Arkansas — because the published record supports one. How this plate is read, for Arkansas: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black share of the state population (alone): 15%; Black share, alone or in combination: 16.3%. Hold the table and the text together and the plate is entire in the reader's hands.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 15% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 16.3% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 490,000 |
| 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.