Black Belt & Regions
The Black Belt in West Virginia
For 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 West 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
Charleston, the capital, is the largest center: the city is roughly a sixth Black within its 48,000 residents, its community centered on the West Side and the blocks around the old Garnet school district, with the Kanawha Valley's chemical-plant towns (South Charleston, Dunbar — roughly a fifth Black, Institute — the village built around West Virginia State) adjoining. Huntington, the river city, is roughly a tenth Black. The southern coalfields hold the historic layer: McDowell County — once the state's most populous county and a center of Black mining life, with towns like Keystone and Kimball (whose war memorial to Black veterans of the First World War is the nation's first) — recorded Black shares in the range of a fifth to a quarter at the industry's peak and still records the state's highest county shares at a fraction of the population. The Eastern Panhandle (Martinsburg, growing in Washington's exurban reach) is the state's growth pole for every group; the northern panhandle and the Allegheny counties record small communities in the low single digits.
Black West Virginia's formation is a coal story with few parallels: the southern fields recruited Black miners from the Virginia and Carolina countryside from the 1880s onward, and the integrated locals of the United Mine Workers — in an era when the industry's union was among the nation's most integrated — made Black miners a political and institutional force in the coalfield counties out of proportion to their numbers. The data trail of the industry's collapse is therefore also the community's: McDowell County's population has fallen from near 100,000 at mid-century to under 20,000, and its Black population with it, the steepest proportional decline of any community in this reference. The remaining coalfield Black population is old in age structure, rooted in place across generations, and served by institutions — churches, the two HBCUs' alumni networks — of long standing.
The Arc as a Whole
No state holds the Black Belt alone. For Virginia, the arc is a single historical geography — one soil, one settlement pattern, one demographic signature — divided by state lines it predates. West 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.
West Virginia holds about 90,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twenty of its people, with Black alone at about 64,000, or 3.6 percent. It is one of the smallest Black state populations in this reference, and one of the oldest in continuous record: a community built in the salt and railroad towns of the Kanawha Valley and the coal camps of the southern fields, where Black miners were a pillar of the industry's workforce and its union. This article profiles the population in the census data.
West Virginia holds two historically Black institutions — West Virginia State University (founded 1891, the land-grant, at Institute outside Charleston) and Bluefield State University (founded 1895, in the coalfield south) — and their modern data make them unique in the HBCU tables: both now enroll majority-white student bodies, a transformation that occurred as their regional missions expanded after desegregation while their HBCU designation and heritage continued. Together they enroll in the range of 5,000 to 6,000 students. They are counted in the education section's HBCU data with this note, and their dual character — historically Black institutions serving substantially white regional populations — is a category of its own in the national tables.
Black West Virginia's indicators mirror the state's: incomes at the low end of the national distribution for all groups (with the Black-white gap within the state narrower than the national gap, in the compressed distribution of a low-income state), homeownership high in the rooted coalfield and valley communities, health outcomes at the difficult end of the tables in line with the state's overall public health position. The estimates show the state's total population declining slowly and its Black population with it, the Eastern Panhandle excepted in both cases. The age structure is the oldest of any Black state population in this reference — the coalfield generation's grandchildren disproportionately live in the metros of the Carolinas, Ohio, and the capital region, a return-migration map legible in the birthplace data of those states' profiles.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| West Virginia State and Bluefield State — both founded for Black students, both now enrolling majority-white student bodies | Two HBCUs |
| Black residents of West Virginia, alone or in combination | 90,000 |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 4% |
| 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.