Metro Plates
Black Birmingham: Concentration and Share
In Birmingham, 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 Birmingham metro, Black residents number about 140,000 and form 71% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 26% 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 71%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. In Birmingham, 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 Birmingham 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.
The distribution reads at state scale in Birmingham, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Birmingham holds about 140,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination, roughly seven in ten of its 200,000 people — at the center of a metropolitan Black population of about 300,000, the largest in Alabama. Founded as a steel city in 1871, Birmingham built one of the South's great industrial Black communities, an enterprise tradition of national significance, and a civil-rights-era record that fixed its name in the world's memory. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Birmingham, but to locate it.
In Birmingham, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Birmingham is the youngest city in this section — founded at a railroad crossing in the coal-and-iron district in 1871 — and its Black population was industrial from birth: miners in the coal camps of the district (including the convict-leased mines whose record the historians document), furnace and foundry workers in the city, and the mill towns of Bessemer, Fairfield, and Ensley where U.S. The 1963 movement year, centered on the downtown churches and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, made the city the movement's symbolic ground; the civil rights district is now a national monument and the population's defining heritage asset. Where the general meets the particular is the table of Birmingham; read the two together.
Reading This Plate
What separates the two definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of the size recorded in Birmingham. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like Birmingham's. Birmingham's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
For Birmingham, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Gaston built, from the 1930s onward, the South's most complete Black business empire — insurance, banking (Citizens Federal), a motel and business college, funeral homes, radio — headquartered on Fourth Avenue and deliberately constructed as institutional infrastructure. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Birmingham's attainment on the other.
In Birmingham, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The metropolitan Black population of 300,000 distributes across Jefferson County's distinctive municipal map: the city itself (roughly 140,000 Black residents), the historically Black mill and mining cities (Bessemer, Fairfield, Brighton, Lipscomb, Midfield), the working suburbs of Center Point, Adamsville, and Forestdale, and growing homeowner communities across the county's west and north. Held against the national ladder, Birmingham's own rows say where its attainment stands.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Birmingham metro, alone or in combination: 140,000; Black share of the Birmingham metro population, alone or in combination: 71%; Black share of the state population, alone: 26%. In Birmingham, 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.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Birmingham metro, alone or in combination | 140,000 |
| Black share of the Birmingham metro population, alone or in combination | 71% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 26% |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; 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.