Black Belt & Regions
The Black Belt in Georgia
In Georgia, the Black Belt is the oldest Black geography in the United States — the arc of dark-soil counties running from Virginia to Texas where Black settlement is deepest and oldest. This plate reads the Black Belt in Georgia: the counties of the arc inside the state's borders, the population they hold, and the pattern they form against the state's cities.
The Arc Inside the State
Georgia's Black geography has two layers. The older layer is the Black Belt: the band of rich-soil counties running across the state's midsection, from Augusta through Macon to Columbus and down into the southwest around Albany, where enslaved labor worked the cotton economy and where Black population shares remain the state's highest — many of these counties are majority Black today. The newer layer is metropolitan Atlanta, which holds more than half of all Black Georgians and is profiled in full in the cities section of this reference. Between them sit mid-sized Black population centers — Savannah on the coast, Augusta on the South Carolina line, Macon and Columbus in the Black Belt itself, and Athens in the northeast — each with Black shares at or above the state figure.
No state has gained more from the New Great Migration than Georgia. Census migration data show Black movers arriving from New York, Florida, Illinois, and California, overwhelmingly to metro Atlanta and its suburbs, making Georgia's Black population one of the fastest-growing in the nation in absolute terms. The arrivals are disproportionately college-educated and higher-income relative to the existing population — the selective pattern documented in the migration articles of this section — which has lifted Georgia's Black attainment and income medians even as the Black Belt counties record some of the state's most difficult economic data. Both movements are in the numbers, and profiles that quote only the state average conceal each of them.
The Arc as a Whole
No state holds the Black Belt alone. In Georgia, the arc is a single historical geography — one soil, one settlement pattern, one demographic signature — divided by state lines it predates. Georgia's counties of the arc share more, demographically, with the arc counties of the neighboring states than with their own state's newest suburbs, and this section of the atlas is built on that fact: the Black Belt plates are written state by state for the shelf, but they are meant to be read as one plate in eighteen pieces.
Georgia is the state where Black America's scale and share coincide most completely. The decennial census counted about 3.6 million Black Georgians — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in three residents of the state, with Black alone at about 3.3 million, or 31 percent. No other large state combines so large a Black population with so high a Black share, and the combination shapes everything in the Georgia data: its politics of place, its business landscape, its college map, and its position at the center of the modern Black migration to the South. This article profiles the population in the census record.
Georgia was the last of the original colonies to legalize slavery and then built one of the largest enslaved populations in the South; by the Civil War, nearly half of Georgians were enslaved. The Sea Islands and the Savannah coast hold the Gullah-Geechee communities, descendants of West Africans whose language and culture retained unusually direct African continuities, now recognized in a federally designated cultural heritage corridor. Emancipation, land struggles, and the long Jim Crow era pushed generations of Black Georgians north in the Great Migration, yet Georgia, like Texas, retained a very large Black population throughout — the base on which the modern return migration has built.
Georgia's Black population is anchored institutionally by the largest concentration of historically Black colleges in the country: the Atlanta University Center consortium, Savannah State, Fort Valley State, and Albany State among them. Black Georgians record educational attainment above the national Black average, driven by the Atlanta metro. The foreign-born share of Georgia's Black population — Caribbean and African communities concentrated in Atlanta's eastern suburbs — is among the highest in the South. Age structure is favorable: the Black population is younger than the state's overall population, sustaining growth even where migration slows.
The counties of the Georgia arc are rural, and their Black shares — commonly the highest in the state — invert the usual American pattern in which Black population concentrates in cities. In Georgia, that inversion is the Black Belt's signature on every plate in this section: a countryside that is not a remainder between cities, but the foundation the cities were built from, counted here on its own terms.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| roughly one in three Georgians is Black — among the highest shares of any large state | 1 in 3 |
| Black residents of Georgia, alone or in combination | 3.6 Million |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 33% |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
| Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination (Census Bureau population estimates) | 52.8 million |
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.