Black Belt & Regions
The Black Belt in Maryland
In Maryland, 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 Maryland: 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
Maryland holds about 2 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in three of its people, with Black alone at about 1.82 million, or 29.5 percent. That is the highest Black population share of any state outside the Deep South, and Maryland's Black population is among the most affluent in the nation: its signature jurisdiction, Prince George's County, is the wealthiest majority-Black county in America, its capital city region is Baltimore, and its suburbs feed the federal economy. This article profiles the population in the census data.
Prince George's County, adjoining Washington on its east, holds roughly 580,000 Black residents — about 64 percent of its 967,000 people — the largest majority-Black county population in the nation. Its data break the reference's usual associations: median Black household income in the county has run at or above the national median for all households, homeownership is high, and its subdivisions — Bowie, Upper Marlboro, Fort Washington, Mitchellville, Woodmore — contain some of the most affluent Black neighborhoods in the United States, built across two generations by the federal workforce the Washington profile documents. The county is the suburban Black America's flagship jurisdiction, and its statistics anchor the optimistic end of nearly every distribution in this reference.
The Arc as a Whole
No state holds the Black Belt alone. In Maryland, the arc is a single historical geography — one soil, one settlement pattern, one demographic signature — divided by state lines it predates. Maryland'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.
The contrast is also generational in the data: Baltimore's Black population is the older of the two poles, its age structure weighted by out-migration of the young, while Prince George's records one of the youngest and most family-heavy Black suburban profiles in the nation — the state's future being written, demographically, in its suburbs.
The counties of the Maryland 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 Maryland, 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.
In Maryland, read as a region, the pattern crosses the state borders the other plates observe, and the table below fixes its measures. In Maryland, what the federal record cannot do is count a place's meaning — only its people. In Maryland, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
Filed in this series as The Black Belt in Maryland, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. Its table records of Prince George's County is Black — the nation's most affluent majority-Black county: 64%; Black residents of Maryland, alone or in combination: 2 Million. The plate reports what the sources publish for Maryland and leaves alone what they do not.
Here, on the plate for Maryland, read as a region, the pattern crosses the state borders the other plates observe, and the table below fixes its measures. The figures here are the published ones, rounded as the source agencies round them, and they describe the population as the federal record counts it: residents, in place, on the reference dates of the census and the survey. Maryland's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: of Prince George's County is Black — the nation's most affluent majority-Black county: 64%; Black residents of Maryland, alone or in combination: 2 Million; Black share of the state population, alone: 31%. In Maryland, each figure is published by the source named below and rounded as published; the plate's map shades the Black share of the population on the same basis, so the table and the map can be read against each other without conversion.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| of Prince George's County is Black — the nation's most affluent majority-Black county | 64% |
| Black residents of Maryland, alone or in combination | 2 Million |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 31% |
| 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.