Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Akron
Akron's Black community, about 59,000 strong and 31% of the city, was built by the tire plants and carries one of Ohio's deepest Black civic records. The census portrait.
The Place in the Atlas
The Akron file in this atlas opens with its metro plate — distribution, built on the figures this page carries: a Black community forming 31% of its metro on the alone-or-in-combination count. Around it stand the state plates for the state Akron anchors, whose Black alone share is 13%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin here, and every plate named above is one shelf away.
A gazetteer is the oldest part of any atlas — the index of places, with the facts that fix a place in the whole. The facts that fix Akron are its size within Black America, its share of its own ground, and its position in the national pattern of concentration. Those are the coordinates this page records, drawn from the same published federal figures as every other page in the book. The plates behind this page give them depth; the gazetteer gives them an address.
Reading the Coordinates
The shares on this page cross two definitions, and the page says so: the metro figure is an alone-or-in-combination share, while the state figure of 13% is the alone count the atlas's maps shade by. The difference between the definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of this size. What survives either definition is the ordering: where Akron stands against its state and against the national alone share of 13.5%, which is the gazetteer's whole information in one line.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of Akron arriving here finds the community counted, placed, and connected to its state and national frames in a single page. From this page the shelf runs in three directions — down into the place's own plates, up into the state's, and out into the national series that holds them all. That is the gazetteer's promise in every atlas ever bound, kept here for Akron.
The Community in Its Frame
A place file is a promise that the counting will continue. The figures on this page are the current vintage of the federal record for Akron, and they will be revised as new counts publish. What does not revise is the file's structure: a community of this standing, in this state, inside this national pattern. The gazetteer holds the structure still so the numbers can move, which is the only way an atlas stays honest across editions.
For the reader who arrives from the map: Akron's state is shaded at 13% on every plate in this atlas, and the community inside it is one of the concentrations that shading is made of. For the reader who arrives from the place itself, the direction reverses — the community first, the shading as its summary. Both readers are holding the same facts. The gazetteer page is where the two directions meet, and it is deliberately the shortest road in the atlas between a person and the counted whole they belong to.
Kept with the Akron page are the standing facts of its file: the community's count and share as the federal record publishes them, the state frame of 13% that the maps shade by, and the national frame of 52.8 million Black residents, alone or in combination, inside which every figure in this atlas sits. A gazetteer entry is short by design — its work is placement, not narration — and the plates behind this page carry the narration in full.
Editions of this atlas will return to Akron as the counts revise, and the gazetteer will keep this page's shape when they do: the place named, its community counted, its coordinates stated against its state and its nation. That stability is deliberate. A reference work earns trust by holding its form while its figures move, so that a reader who learned the shelf from any one page can read every page — and so that Akron, whenever it is looked up, is found on the same terms as everywhere else in Black America.
How this plate is read, for Your Place: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black share of the Akron metro population: 31%; Black share of the state population, alone: 13%. Where the general meets the particular is the table of Akron; read the two together.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the Akron metro population | 31% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 13% |
| Black share of the United States population, alone | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census and American Community Survey 5-year estimates; City of Akron; University of Akron archives and Akron Beacon Journal records. 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.