Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Atlanta
Metro Atlanta holds more than two million Black residents — roughly one in three, second only to New York. The suburban distribution, migration history, and composition of Black Atlanta in the census data.
The Place in the Atlas
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. Atlanta is the standard case study in modern Black geography — a Southern metro that drew Black migrants during the Great Migration's later decades, then became the leading destination of the return migration to the South, and now holds a Black population that is simultaneously one of the country's largest, most educated, and most economically prominent. This article profiles the Atlanta metro's Black population in the census data: its size, distribution, and composition.
The Atlanta–Sandy Springs–Roswell metropolitan statistical area, as the Census Bureau defines it, spans more than two dozen counties and over six million residents. Its Black population — counting Black alone or in combination — exceeds two million, about 34 percent of the metro total. Only the New York metropolitan area counts more Black residents in absolute terms, and no large metro outside the South matches Atlanta's combination of scale and share. The city of Atlanta itself, the metro's core municipality of roughly half a million people, is just under half Black — a share that has declined from clear-majority levels as the city's population has grown and diversified, even as the metro-wide Black population has continued to expand.
Plates for This Place
The Atlanta file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 2 million Black residents, 34% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Atlanta anchors, whose Black alone share is 33%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Atlanta, 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 Atlanta in the whole. The facts that fix Atlanta are its size within Black America, its share of its own ground, and its position in the national pattern of concentration: a metro whose Black community is large enough, and established enough, to appear in every national table the federal record publishes. Those are the coordinates. The plates give them depth.
For Atlanta, the defining geographic fact of Black Atlanta is that it is mostly suburban. The largest county-level Black populations sit outside the city core: DeKalb County, immediately east of the city, holds one of the largest Black populations of any county in the nation and is majority Black; Clayton County to the south records one of the highest Black population shares of any large county in the country; and substantial Black populations extend through Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb, Henry, and Douglas counties. This suburbanization mirrors the national pattern documented in the census section — the Black population of the United States is now majority-suburban in the largest metros — and Atlanta is its clearest example.
Atlanta's Black growth is a migration story in two movements. The first was industrial-era and modest by Northern standards: Atlanta drew Black Georgians from the state's rural counties to railroad, service, and domestic work, building institutions — including the Atlanta University Center, the nation's largest consortium of historically Black colleges — that anchored Black civic life. 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. Census migration data consistently rank Atlanta among the top destinations for Black movers, and the metro's Black population growth in recent decades has come more from migration than from natural increase.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Atlanta metro arriving here finds the community counted, placed, and connected to its state and national frames in a single page. That is the gazetteer's promise in every atlas ever bound, and it is the promise this section of Atlasmont exists to keep — place by place, until the whole map is covered.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Atlanta metro, alone or in combination | 2 million |
| Black share of the Atlanta metro population | 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.