Black Belt & Regions
Black Population in Illinois: Chicago and the Small Majorities
The subject here is Black Population in Illinois: Chicago and the Small Majorities, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. Its table records Black residents of Illinois, alone or in combination: 2 Million; East St. Louis is more than nine-tenths Black — among the highest shares of any American city: 9 in 10. In Illinois, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
In Illinois, the regional series holds its geography whole; the state plates elsewhere in the atlas divide the same ground by state lines. Illinois holds about 2 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in six of its people, with Black alone at about 1.8 million, or 14 percent. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Illinois's table states plainly.
Downstate: The Railroad Cities
In Illinois, read as a region, the pattern crosses the state borders the other plates observe, and the table below fixes its measures. Springfield, the state capital, is about a fifth Black, with a community reaching back to the free Black settlements of the 1820s. Illinois's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
The Southern Tier
In Illinois, this regional plate reads the same federal material at the scale of the region itself, and the table below carries its published measures. Illinois's southern counties complicate its Northern image. In Illinois, held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
Institutions
For Illinois, read as a region, the pattern crosses the state borders the other plates observe, and the table below fixes its measures. In Illinois, chicago State University, on the city's South Side, is the state's public predominantly Black university and one of the Midwest's designated HBCU-equivalent institutions; Southern Illinois University's campuses, the University of Illinois system, and the state's community colleges carry the remainder of Black enrollment in the education data. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Illinois's attainment on the other.
Composition and Change
For Illinois, the regional series holds its geography whole; the state plates elsewhere in the atlas divide the same ground by state lines. In Illinois, the estimates record an Illinois Black population that is stable in count and slowly declining in share: Chicago's dynamics dominate — the city's Black population decline and suburban growth chronicled in its profile — while downstate's small cities lose population with their regions. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Illinois, but to locate it.
Reading the Illinois Numbers
The downstate communities also hold a distinction the income tables miss: several — East St. Louis, Cairo, and the old settlements of Brooklyn, Illinois, among the first towns incorporated by Black Americans in the nation — are among the oldest continuous Black municipalities in the United States, governed by Black officials for well over a century, a civic continuity the state's data has recorded longer than any Midwestern peer's.
Illinois teaches the section's concentration lesson in reverse: a state known for one enormous Black metropolis whose full profile requires the small majorities and railroad cities that the Chicago figure hides. The two million divide into roughly three-quarters in one metro and one-quarter scattered across a dozen smaller communities, each with its own census story — and the state average, as ever, belongs to neither.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of Illinois, alone or in combination: 2 Million; East St. Louis is more than nine-tenths Black — among the highest shares of any American city: 9 in 10. In Illinois, 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 Illinois 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 Illinois, 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 Illinois: Black residents of Illinois, alone or in combination: 2 Million; East St. Louis is more than nine-tenths Black — among the highest shares of any American city: 9 in 10. The measures above and these together fix the population of Illinois 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 Illinois, alone or in combination | 2 Million |
| East St. Louis is more than nine-tenths Black — among the highest shares of any American city | 9 in 10 |
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.