Metro Plates
Black Dallas: The Metroplex's Southern Half
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black Dallas: the population itself — its size, its share of the metro, and its distribution across the city and suburbs that make up the metropolitan whole.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Black Dallas: The Metroplex's Southern Half. 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 plate reports what the sources publish for Dallas and leaves alone what they do not.
South Dallas and the Historic Core
In Dallas, 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. In Dallas, 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. Held against the national ladder, Dallas's own rows say where its attainment stands.
The Best Southwest
This plate takes up its subject directly: Black Dallas: The Metroplex's Southern Half. Its table records Black residents of the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, approximately: 1.2 Million; DeSoto, Lancaster, and Cedar Hill — affluent majority-Black suburbs ranked among the nation's strongest Black communities: Best Southwest. In Dallas, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
Growth and Composition
Filed in this series as Black Dallas: The Metroplex's Southern Half, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. Its table records Black residents of the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, approximately: 1.2 Million; DeSoto, Lancaster, and Cedar Hill — affluent majority-Black suburbs ranked among the nation's strongest Black communities: Best Southwest. Here, on the plate for Dallas, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
Reading the Dallas Numbers
Two Anchors, One Metroplex
The metroplex form itself shapes the data. Dallas and Fort Worth are separate central cities thirty miles apart, and Black Tarrant County — Fort Worth's historic east side and the suburbs of Arlington, Grand Prairie, and Mansfield — adds several hundred thousand Black residents whom a Dallas-only account would miss. The two counties' Black populations differ in profile: Dallas County's is older-established and more suburbanized into the southern tier, Tarrant's more concentrated in its central city and growing suburbs. Regional planners' data treat the metroplex as one labor and housing market, and this reference follows them: the profile's headline figure is the combined one, and the county tables beneath it keep the two anchors distinct.
The Dallas profile's discipline mirrors Houston's, eighty miles of Texas away in pattern if not in distance: quote the metro, not the city, for the population's true scale — 1.2 million, top-ten among American metros — and quote the suburbs, not the historic core alone, for its center of gravity. The movement from freedmen's towns to the Best Southwest within a few generations is the single arc the census tables record, and the tract profiles in this section trace it street by street.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, approximately: 1.2 Million; DeSoto, Lancaster, and Cedar Hill — affluent majority-Black suburbs ranked among the nation's strongest Black communities: Best Southwest. For 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.
The record behind this plate of Dallas is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Where the table carries a national benchmark row for Dallas, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Dallas: Black residents of the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, approximately: 1.2 Million; DeSoto, Lancaster, and Cedar Hill — affluent majority-Black suburbs ranked among the nation's strongest Black communities: Best Southwest. The measures above and these together fix the population of Dallas as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area, approximately | 1.2 Million |
| DeSoto, Lancaster, and Cedar Hill — affluent majority-Black suburbs ranked among the nation's strongest Black communities | Best Southwest |
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.