Black Belt & Regions
The Black Belt in Illinois
In Illinois, 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 Illinois: 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
Illinois's southern counties complicate its Northern image. The state's first constitution-era settlement included slavery in the salt works and a Black population in the southern counties from the territorial period; the region's Black communities — in Pulaski, Alexander, and Williamson counties among others — are old, rural, and small. The state's overall Black share of one in six, modest beside the Deep South profiles, thus spans two Black Americas within one state: the rural southern tier settled in slavery's era and the industrial corridor of the north, joined by the railroads that carried the Great Migration through the downstate towns on its way to Chicago — many of whose passengers stopped, and stayed, at every station on the line.
Chicago State University, on the city's South Side, is the state's public predominantly Black university and one of the Midwest's designated HBCU-equivalent institutions; Southern Illinois University's campuses, the University of Illinois system, and the state's community colleges carry the remainder of Black enrollment in the education data. The state's Black political infrastructure — built on Chicago's congressional delegation and extending through the capital — is among the most established in the nation, and its Black professional class, documented in the Chicago profile, is the region's largest. Downstate, the same institutional thinness the rural profiles record elsewhere applies: fewer Black institutions per capita, in communities whose scale cannot support them.
The Arc as a Whole
No state holds the Black Belt alone. In Illinois, the arc is a single historical geography — one soil, one settlement pattern, one demographic signature — divided by state lines it predates. Illinois'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.
Illinois holds about 2 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in six of its people, with Black alone at about 1.8 million, or 14 percent. The state's Black geography is a study in concentration: the large majority lives in metropolitan Chicago, profiled in the cities section, but the state's distinctive contribution to the national map lies downstate, in a set of small and mid-sized cities — East St. Louis, Springfield, Rockford, Peoria, Champaign, Cairo — where Black communities formed along the railroads and river towns a century before the great Chicago waves. This article profiles the state population.
Illinois's rivers and rails made its small cities Black early. East St. Louis, across the Mississippi from St. Louis, is more than nine-tenths Black — among the highest shares of any city in the nation — a small industrial city whose population has fallen by more than half from its mid-century peak as its industries closed, leaving one of the most difficult municipal datasets in America. Springfield, the state capital, is about a fifth Black, with a community reaching back to the free Black settlements of the 1820s. Rockford, Peoria, Decatur, Champaign-Urbana, and the Quad Cities each hold Black populations in the range of a fifth to a quarter of their cities — manufacturing and university communities whose indicators track the national urban pattern. Cairo, at the state's southern tip where the Ohio meets the Mississippi, was a historic Black river town of national significance in the steamboat era.
The estimates record an Illinois Black population that is stable in count and slowly declining in share: Chicago's dynamics dominate — the city's Black population decline and suburban growth chronicled in its profile — while downstate's small cities lose population with their regions. The state's Black indicators, income and attainment and health, run near national Black averages in the metro and below them downstate, and its foreign-born Black population, concentrated in Chicago and its suburbs, is the Midwest's largest, layering African and Caribbean communities over the native-born base.
The counties of the Illinois 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 Illinois, 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 |
|---|---|
| East St. Louis is more than nine-tenths Black — among the highest shares of any American city | 9 in 10 |
| Black residents of Illinois, alone or in combination | 2 Million |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 14% |
| 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.