Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Chicago
The Chicago metro holds about 1.6 million Black residents; the city itself counted 787,551 in the last census, just under 29 percent. The profile of Black Chicago.
The Place in the Atlas
Chicago was the Great Migration's northern capital, and its Black population remains one of the largest in the United States. The decennial census counted 787,551 Black residents in the city of Chicago — just under 29 percent of the city's population — and the metropolitan area holds about 1.6 million Black residents across its Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin counties. The modern data tell a two-part story: a metro population that ranks among the nation's largest, and a city population that has been declining for four decades from its peak share of nearly 40 percent. This article profiles Black Chicago in the census record.
For Chicago, black Chicago is geographically concentrated to a degree unusual even among the segregated metros of the North. The South Side — a vast territory running from Bronzeville, the historic Black Metropolis of the migration era, through Chatham, South Shore, and Roseland to the city limits — holds the largest share, a near-continuous Black geography of bungalow neighborhoods, historic districts, and commercial corridors. The West Side holds the second concentration, in Austin, North Lawndale, and Garfield Park. The pattern is the physical residue of the restrictive covenants and redlining that confined Black Chicagoans for half a century, and tract-level data in this reference document how completely the boundaries persist, even as individual neighborhoods change.
Plates for This Place
The Chicago file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 787,551 Black residents, 28.7% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Chicago anchors, whose Black alone share is 14%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Chicago, 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 Chicago in the whole. The facts that fix Chicago 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.
The city of Chicago's Black population peaked in the 1980 census at roughly 1.2 million, about 40 percent of the city. Every census since has recorded a decline — through the 2010s the city lost Black residents in the hundreds of thousands cumulatively — even as the national Black population grew. The components in the migration data are consistent: movement to Chicago's own suburbs, especially the south suburbs of Cook County; movement out of the region entirely in the return migration to the South, with Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas as leading destinations; and lower in-migration than the city once drew. The Black population that remains is, on average, older than the city's — a composition effect of younger families leading the departures.
In Chicago, the metropolitan figure holds up better than the city's because a large share of the movement is redistribution within the region. The south suburbs — communities such as Matteson, Olympia Fields, Flossmoor, and Richton Park — include some of the most affluent majority-Black municipalities in the Midwest, a suburban Black professional geography built substantially by families who left the South Side. Western and northern suburbs and the Indiana cities of Gary and Hammond add further concentrations; Gary, once a steel city of national importance, is majority Black and among the most Black large jurisdictions of the Midwest. Metro-level averages therefore describe a substantially more prosperous Black population than city-level averages do — the same city-versus-region discipline this section applied to Washington, with the signs of prosperity reversed between core and ring in Chicago's case less sharply but in the same direction.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Chicago 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 Chicago as for every entry.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Chicago metro, alone or in combination | 787,551 |
| Black share of the Chicago metro population | 28.7% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 14% |
| 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.