Metro Plates
Black Dallas: Concentration and Share
Where the general meets the particular is the table of Dallas; read the two together. In the Dallas metro, Black residents number about 1.2 million and form 24% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 13% 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 24%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. In Dallas, 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 Dallas 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 Dallas, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. The Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex — the fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States — holds about 1.2 million Black residents, and the city of Dallas itself about 300,000, roughly one in four of its people. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Dallas's table states plainly.
For Dallas, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Black Dallas was built in the communities south of downtown — the freedmen's towns and neighborhoods that grew along the Trinity River and the rail lines: Deep Ellum's northern edges, South Dallas, Fair Park, and the Oak Cliff district across the river, which today holds a large share of the city's Black population within its own extensive geography. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Dallas's attainment on the other.
Reading This Plate
What separates the two definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of the size recorded in Dallas. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like Dallas's. Dallas's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
In Dallas, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The demographic distinction of Black Dallas is suburban and southern-tier. Held against the national midpoint, Dallas's own rows say how its households stand.
In Dallas, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Dallas–Fort Worth is among the fastest-growing large metros in the nation, and its Black population grows with it — through natural increase, through the domestic migration stream documented in the Texas state profile, and through African immigration that has given north Dallas and its suburbs substantial Nigerian, Ethiopian, and other African communities. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Dallas's households stand.
The gazetteer pages of this atlas gather the Dallas file in one place — the metro plates, the state plates for its state, and the national plates that frame both. In Dallas, concentration is the thread that runs through all of them: it is why this metro carries the weight it does in the national distribution, and why its movements, gains and losses alike, register in the national counts when they come.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Dallas metro, alone or in combination: 1.2 million; Black share of the Dallas metro population, alone or in combination: 24%; Black share of the state population, alone: 13%. In Dallas, 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.
How this plate is read, for Dallas: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black residents of the Dallas metro, alone or in combination: 1.2 million; Black share of the Dallas metro population, alone or in combination: 24%. In Dallas, the two presentations are one record in two forms, and a reader who checks one against the other has the plate's whole method in hand.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Dallas metro, alone or in combination | 1.2 million |
| Black share of the Dallas metro population, alone or in combination | 24% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 13% |
| 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.