Metro Plates
Black Dallas: Growth and Movement
In Dallas, metros are where the national movement story is actually decided — the gains and losses of a few dozen large communities add up to the country's direction. This plate reads the movement record of Black Dallas, a metro of about 1.2 million Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
For Dallas, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Here, on the plate 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. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national ladder, and the attainment recorded in Dallas.
The migration currents read locally in Dallas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. For Dallas, the demographic distinction of Black Dallas is suburban and southern-tier. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Dallas, but to locate it.
For Dallas, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Dallas, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Dallas's households on the other.
The Currents Around the Metro
In Dallas, the present era's currents run in several directions at once: toward the South and its suburbs, out of the highest-cost coastal metros, and into mid-sized metros whose Black populations are growing fastest in percentage terms. The Dallas metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. In Dallas, each decennial census and each survey year revises the picture at the margin; the direction of the lines is the story, and this plate is built to be re-read as the lines extend.
The migration currents read locally in Dallas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Dallas's own record, stated plainly in the table.
Movement into and out of the Dallas metro is measured in the federal record as the difference between counts, and its streams — births and deaths inside the metro, arrivals from other American places, arrivals from abroad — are published separately in the estimates program. In Dallas, read together with the concentration plate, the movement record explains how the share above came to be, and where it is tending.
For Dallas, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Read this plate together with its companions. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national midpoint, and the households of Dallas.
This plate takes up its subject directly: Black Dallas: Growth and Movement. 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%. For Dallas, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Black Dallas: Growth and Movement. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for Dallas.
In Dallas, 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. The table's benchmark row for Dallas states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis. This note is written for the movement plate; the companion plates of the same place carry notes of their own.
| 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.