Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Dallas
Dallas–Fort Worth holds about 1.2 million Black residents. The city of Dallas is roughly one in four Black, and its southwestern suburbs include some of America's most affluent Black communities.
The Place in the Atlas
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. Black Dallas presents the suburban pattern of Black Texas in its most developed form: a historic core community in the city's southern half, and around it, in the suburbs locally marketed as the Best Southwest, some of the most affluent majority-Black municipalities in America. This article profiles the metro's Black population in the census data.
For 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. The State-Thomas area, one of the oldest freedmen's communities in Texas, survives as a designated historic district just north of downtown. As in Houston, the institutions followed: Bishop College, a historically Black institution, operated in Oak Cliff for decades before its closure, and Paul Quinn College — founded in the nineteenth century and among the oldest HBCUs west of the Mississippi — carries the tradition today, alongside the congregations and businesses of the southern sector.
Plates for This Place
The Dallas file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 1.2 million Black residents, 24% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Dallas anchors, whose Black alone share is 13%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Dallas, 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 Dallas in the whole. The facts that fix Dallas 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.
In Dallas, the demographic distinction of Black Dallas is suburban and southern-tier. DeSoto, Lancaster, Cedar Hill, and Duncanville — the cluster southwest of the city nicknamed the Best Southwest — include majority-Black suburbs with median household incomes above the metro's overall median, a combination found in only a handful of American geographies, among them Prince George's County outside Washington. These communities were built substantially by Black Dallas families moving south from Oak Cliff and South Dallas in the late twentieth century, and they record the survey profile of established professional suburbs: high homeownership, high attainment, and local governments led by the population they house. Fort Worth, the metroplex's western anchor, holds its own historic Black community on the city's east and southeast sides, and the mid-cities and Arlington add growing suburban populations between the two cores.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Dallas's among them. The metro's Black indicators run above national Black averages on income and attainment, pulled up by the suburban weight of the distribution, while the historic core neighborhoods of South Dallas record indicators well below the metro Black average — the standard wide dispersion of this section's growth-metro profiles, in which the average describes a population distributed between some of the most and least prosperous Black geographies in Texas.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Dallas 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 Dallas as for every entry.
How this plate is read, for Your Place: 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: 24%. For 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 | 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.