Metro Plates
Black Population in Bessemer, Alabama
Bessemer is a city of about 25,500 people in Jefferson County, Alabama, some fifteen miles southwest of downtown Birmingham — and about 76 percent of its residents are Black, making it one of the largest majority-Black cities in the Birmingham metropolitan area. Bessemer was founded in the 1880s as a purpose-built industrial town in the iron-and-steel district that made Birmingham the steel capital of the South, and its demography was forged in the mill villages, ore mines, and rail yards of that economy. When the heavy industry contracted in the late twentieth century, the city that remained was working-class, substantially Black, and tightly bound to the fortunes of the wider Birmingham region. This article profiles Bessemer's Black population in the census data: its size, its industrial roots, and its present economic standing.
Size and Share
The 2020 census counted roughly 19,400 Black residents in Bessemer, a share of about 76 percent that has risen steadily over recent decades as the city's white population declined and its Black population held comparatively steady. Bessemer's Black majority is a metropolitan fact as much as a municipal one: it anchors the southwestern side of a Birmingham metro whose core city is itself about 69 percent Black, and its neighborhoods grade into the majority-Black communities of Brighton, Lipscomb, and Midfield along the old industrial corridor. The city's population peaked in the steel era and has fallen gradually since — from above 33,000 in the late twentieth century to about 25,500 today — but the Black population's absolute size has declined far less than the total, which is precisely why the share has climbed.
A Steel City's Population
Bessemer exists because of what lay under the hills around it: iron ore, coal, and limestone in close proximity, the three ingredients of steel. The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company and its successor interests built furnaces and mills across the district, and Black workers — first recruited from Alabama's farm counties, then arriving in the industrial migration out of the Black Belt — formed a large share of that workforce from the beginning. Company housing, Black churches, and fraternal institutions grew up around the plants, and Bessemer developed the dense institutional life of a Black steel town: its own Black business districts, its own congregations, and a union-era tradition in which Black mill workers were central. The collapse of Southern steel employment in the 1970s and 1980s removed the economic engine without removing the community, and the Bessemer of the census today is the inheritor of that history — a city whose Black majority was built by industrial labor.
Income, Work, and the Regional Economy
Bessemer's median household income is about $38,000 and roughly 24 percent of residents live in poverty; about 14 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher. Those figures sit below the national marks but above the poorest Black Belt county seats, reflecting the city's place inside a metropolitan labor market rather than an isolated rural one. The modern Bessemer economy runs on logistics and distribution along the Interstate 20/59 corridor, retail at its highway interchanges, health care, and public employment, and large numbers of its residents commute into the wider Birmingham economy — to the medical center downtown, to the surviving industrial employers of Jefferson County, and to the service economy of the suburbs. Amazon's large fulfillment center in Bessemer, which opened in 2020 and employs thousands drawn from across the western metro, became the city's emblematic new employer. The census profile, in short, is of a majority-Black industrial city in transition: its steel-era population largely stayed, and its economic story is now the story of the whole Birmingham region's reinvention. The metropolitan tables put Bessemer in its full context. Jefferson County as a whole is about 43 percent Black, and the county's Black population is distributed between Birmingham itself, Bessemer, and a ring of majority-Black industrial suburbs — Brighton, Fairfield, Midfield, Lipscomb — that together form one of the most concentrated Black urban regions in the South. Bessemer is that region's second city. Its Black population of some 19,400 is the descendant community of the ore miners and furnace crews who built the district, and its institutions — its churches, its schools, its halls and lodges — preserve the organizational depth of the steel era in living form. The census profile records a community whose industry changed around it and whose presence never wavered.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| median household income | $38,000 |
| of residents live below the poverty line | 24% |
| of Bessemer's residents are Black | 76% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Bessemer city, Alabama 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.