Black Belt & Regions
The Black Belt in Virginia
In Virginia, 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 Virginia: 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
Virginia holds about 1.85 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — about one in five of its people, with Black alone at about 1.6 million, or 19 percent. No state frames Black America's arc more completely: the first enslaved Africans in English America arrived at Point Comfort, in present-day Hampton, in 1619; Richmond became the domestic slave trade's second city and the capital of the Confederacy; and the modern commonwealth holds a Black population that is simultaneously rural-rooted in the Southside tobacco country, urban in Richmond and Hampton Roads, and suburban in the counties outside Washington. This article profiles the population in the census data.
Richmond, the capital, is more than two-fifths Black, a city whose Black history runs from Gabriel's planned rebellion and the slave markets of Shockoe Bottom to the Jackson Ward district — once called the Harlem of the South, a center of Black banking and business that included Maggie Walker's founding of the first chartered bank by a woman of any race in the nation. Virginia Union University anchors its Black education. South and west of the city, the Southside counties — the tobacco belt where enslaved labor was densest — retain Black shares at or above the state figure, with Petersburg, an old free-Black and industrial city, majority Black, and Virginia State University, the state's public land-grant HBCU, in its suburbs.
The Arc as a Whole
No state holds the Black Belt alone. In Virginia, the arc is a single historical geography — one soil, one settlement pattern, one demographic signature — divided by state lines it predates. Virginia'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 Hampton Roads region — Norfolk, Hampton, Newport News, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, and their neighbors — holds the state's largest Black concentration and its oldest. Hampton, where the first Africans arrived and where contraband camps of the Civil War sheltered thousands of self-emancipated people, is about half Black; Portsmouth is a majority-Black city; Norfolk, the great naval port, is more than two-fifths Black; and Newport News, built on shipbuilding, stands near two-fifths as well. The region's Black population was built on maritime and federal employment — the Navy economy that made Hampton Roads a Black professional and working-class center — anchored by Hampton University and Norfolk State, two of the nation's prominent HBCUs.
The counties of the Virginia 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 Virginia, 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.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The Black Belt in Virginia — because the published record supports one. Its table records the first enslaved Africans in English America arrived at Point Comfort, in present-day Hampton, Virginia: 1619; Black residents of Virginia, alone or in combination: 1.85 Million. The plate's claim is exactly that, and for a reference it is enough.
In Virginia, an atlas earns its keep in the comparisons it makes possible. This plate is drawn to the same measures, the same definitions, and the same sources as every other plate in its section, so that the place it describes can be set beside any other place in the book without translation. That discipline — one measure, many places — is what separates an atlas from a shelf of unrelated reports, and it is the discipline this page observes in every figure it carries.
In Virginia, 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. Counts of people are the most concrete facts a government publishes, and also the most perishable — each new release revises the last at the margin. The atlas's answer to that perishability is structure: the pattern a plate records outlasts the vintage of any single number on it.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| the first enslaved Africans in English America arrived at Point Comfort, in present-day Hampton, Virginia | 1619 |
| Black residents of Virginia, alone or in combination | 1.85 Million |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 19% |
| 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.