Metro Plates
Black Atlanta: Concentration and Share
Concentration is the metro question in its purest form: how much of a place is Black, and how that share compares with the state and the nation around it. In the Atlanta metro, Black residents number about 2 million and form 34% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 33% for the state as a whole on the alone count, and 13.5% for the United States.
The Share and What It Builds
A share is not a statistic in the abstract; at 34%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. Shares at this level sustain institutions — media, congregations, businesses, and political organizations — that smaller shares cannot, and they shape how a metro appears in every national table this atlas publishes. The Atlanta figure also explains the metro's gravitational pull in the movement plates: concentration is itself an attraction, drawing new residents toward an established community with its institutions already built.
In Atlanta, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The Atlanta metropolitan area holds the second-largest Black population of any metropolitan area in the United States, after New York: more than two million Black residents, roughly one in three people in the region. Held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
The distribution reads at state scale in Atlanta, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Its Black population — counting Black alone or in combination — exceeds two million, about 34 percent of the metro total. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Atlanta's table states plainly.
Reading This Plate
The comparisons on this plate cross two definitions, and the plate says so on its face: the metro share is the alone-or-in-combination figure from the metro profile, while the state and national shares beside it are the alone counts used by the atlas's maps. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — small against shares of this size — and the ordering they produce, metro above state above nation or any other, is the finding. Atlanta's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
In Atlanta, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The defining geographic fact of Black Atlanta is that it is mostly suburban. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Atlanta's particular numbers.
In Atlanta, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The second movement, from the 1970s onward, was larger and different in kind: Black households arrived from New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles in the return migration to the South, drawn by employment growth, lower housing costs, and existing Black institutional life. Held against the national ladder, Atlanta's own rows say where its attainment stands.
The gazetteer pages of this atlas gather the Atlanta file in one place — the metro plates, the state plates for its state, and the national plates that frame both. Concentration is the thread that runs through all of them: it is why this metro carries the weight it does in the national distribution, and why its movements, gains and losses alike, register in the national counts when they come.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Atlanta metro, alone or in combination: 2 million; Black share of the Atlanta metro population, alone or in combination: 34%; Black share of the state population, alone: 33%. In Atlanta, 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.
The record behind this plate of Atlanta is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey; U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program. Where the table carries a national benchmark row for Atlanta, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Atlanta metro, alone or in combination | 2 million |
| Black share of the Atlanta metro population, alone or in combination | 34% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 33% |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey; U.S. Census Bureau, 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.