Metro Plates
Black Atlanta: Growth and Movement
Metros are where the national movement story is actually decided — the gains and losses of a few dozen large communities add up to the country's direction. This plate reads the movement record of Black Atlanta, a metro of about 2 million Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
The migration currents read locally in Atlanta, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Atlanta, but to locate it.
The migration currents read locally in Atlanta, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Its Black population — counting Black alone or in combination — exceeds two million, about 34 percent of the metro total. The general record is background; the local one — Atlanta's, in the table — is the subject.
The migration currents read locally in Atlanta, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Atlanta; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The Currents Around the Metro
The present era's currents run in several directions at once: toward the South and its suburbs, out of the highest-cost coastal metros, and into mid-sized metros whose Black populations are growing fastest in percentage terms. The Atlanta metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. Each decennial census and each survey year revises the picture at the margin; the direction of the lines is the story, and this plate is built to be re-read as the lines extend.
In Atlanta, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Here, on the plate for Atlanta, the defining geographic fact of Black Atlanta is that it is mostly suburban. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Atlanta.
Movement into and out of the Atlanta metro is measured in the federal record as the difference between counts, and its streams — births and deaths inside the metro, arrivals from other American places, arrivals from abroad — are published separately in the estimates program. Read together with the concentration plate, the movement record explains how the share above came to be, and where it is tending.
The migration currents read locally in Atlanta, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. In Atlanta, what the federal record cannot do is count a place's meaning — only its people. Where the general meets the particular is the table of Atlanta; read the two together.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Black Atlanta: Growth and Movement. 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%. The plate reports what the sources publish for Atlanta and leaves alone what they do not.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Black Atlanta: Growth and Movement. Its table records Black residents of the Atlanta metro, alone or in combination: 2 million; Black share of the Atlanta metro population, alone or in combination: 34%. In Atlanta, the atlas asks no more of the material than the material can state.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Atlanta: Black share of the state population, alone: 33%; Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates): 13.5%. The measures above and these together fix the population of Atlanta as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
| 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.