Metro Plates

Black Population in Danville, Virginia

Danville is an independent city of about 42,600 people on the Dan River in Virginia's Southside, hard against the North Carolina line — and about 52 percent of its residents are Black, a majority that makes it one of the larger majority-Black cities in the commonwealth. Danville was for a century a textile and tobacco city: Dan River Mills, once among the largest textile operations in the world, and the bright-leaf tobacco market defined its economy, and Black workers were central to both. Since the mills closed, the city has been rebuilding — and its Black majority is at the center of that reinvention. This article profiles Danville's Black population in the census record: its size, its industrial roots, and its economic present.

Size and Share

The 2020 census counted roughly 22,200 Black residents in Danville, a share of about 52 percent. The surrounding region — Pittsylvania County to the north, the city of Martinsville to the west, and the North Carolina counties to the south — holds a large Black population spread between small cities and countryside, and Danville is its largest urban center. The city's population peaked above 53,000 in the mill era and declined for decades as textile employment collapsed, before stabilizing in recent years. The Black share crossed into majority in the late twentieth century and has held there: as in many Southern industrial cities, the Black community's presence proved more durable than the industry that had drawn and employed it, because its roots ran through churches, neighborhoods, and family land as much as through the mills.

Tobacco, Textiles, and a Black Working Class

Danville's Black working class formed in the two industries that built the city. In the tobacco warehouses and stemming rooms, Black workers handled the bright leaf that made Danville a famous auction market; in Dan River's vast mills, Black employment grew through the twentieth century, fenced at first into the hardest and dirtiest departments and widening as the civil-rights era and union pressure opened the mill floor. Around those wages, Black Danville built its institutions: the congregations of its church rows, the businesses of North Main Street's Black commercial district, and the civic organizations that carried the city's 1963 movement — a summer of demonstrations that drew national attention and a famously hard local response, and that established Danville in the movement's history. When the tobacco market faded and Dan River finally closed in the 2000s, it was this community — its institutions intact, its people rooted — that remained as the city's foundation.

Income and the Reinvention Economy

Danville's median household income is about $40,000, roughly 24 percent of residents live in poverty, and about 16 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher. The city's reinvention strategy has been one of the most watched in the small-city South: a riverfront and warehouse-district revival in the old tobacco rows, recruitment of advanced-manufacturing and technology employers to its industrial parks, Averett University and Danville Community College as its education anchors, and the Caesars Virginia casino resort, opened in the old mill district, as its largest new private employer. For the Black majority, the census figures capture a city mid-turn: incomes still carrying the mill collapse, poverty still elevated, but population stabilized and investment visibly returning to a place whose Black community — 52 percent of the city — is the largest single constituency in whatever Danville becomes next. The Black community's imprint shows in every measurement beyond the headcount. Black Danvillians form the backbone of the city's church life, its public-school families, and much of its small-business ownership, and the city's revival projects — the riverwalk, the warehouse lofts, the new employers at its industrial parks — all operate in a city whose largest population they must serve to succeed. Regional demographers note Danville as the anchor of a Black Southside: from Martinsville to South Boston, the counties along the North Carolina line hold Black shares between a quarter and a half, and Danville's 52 percent is the urban peak of that regional pattern. It is, in the plainest census terms, a Black city that happens also to be an old tobacco town, and its data read that way in every table the Bureau publishes.

The record behind this plate of Population in Danville, Virginia is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Danville city, Virginia. Where the table carries a national benchmark row for Danville, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Danville city, Virginia 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.

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