Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Birmingham
Birmingham is about seven-tenths Black — some 140,000 residents — at the center of a 300,000-person Black metro built by steel and enterprise. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
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. This article profiles the population in the census data.
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. Steel's works anchored Black neighborhoods that remain majority Black today. The city's Black districts — the historic Fourth Avenue business district, Smithfield, Titusville, Enon Ridge — formed a complete civic world by the early twentieth century, with the Fourth Avenue corridor's theaters, offices, and the Masonic Temple building as its commercial heart. 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.
Plates for This Place
The Birmingham file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 140,000 Black residents, 71% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Birmingham anchors, whose Black alone share is 26%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Birmingham, 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 Birmingham in the whole. The facts that fix Birmingham 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.
Birmingham's business data carry a lineage the business section should record at city scale. A. G. 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 empire's remnants and successors, alongside the city's Black contractors of the steel and construction economy, the Birmingham Times' publishing run, and the modern layer of Black firms in health care and services around the UAB medical economy, give Birmingham a Black business tradition whose depth exceeds its current scale. The Annual Business Survey's Birmingham tables show the modern position honestly: substantial counts, receipts concentrated in services and construction, and the scale ceiling the capital data describe everywhere.
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. Over the mountain — the local phrase for the affluent southern suburbs of Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, and Homewood — the Black shares fall to the low single digits, the metro's starkest internal contrast drawn by a single ridge. Shelby County, the growth engine to the south, records a rising Black population in the Hoover and Alabaster corridors. The university economy (UAB, the metro's largest employer) and the health system anchor the modern workforce, with Miles College in Fairfield and Lawson State carrying the community-college and HBCU layers — Birmingham is one of the few metros its size with an HBCU inside a majority-Black mill city.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Birmingham metro arriving here finds the community counted, placed, and connected to its state and national frames in a single page. Holding the structure still while the numbers move is the gazetteer's work — the only way an atlas stays honest across editions, for Birmingham as for every entry.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Birmingham metro, alone or in combination | 140,000 |
| Black share of the Birmingham metro population | 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.