Metro Plates
Black Kansas City: Growth and Movement
In Kansas City, 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 Kansas City, a metro of about 150,000 Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
The migration currents read locally in Kansas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Kansas City, Missouri, holds about 150,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination, roughly three in ten of its 510,000 people — and the bi-state metropolitan area about 270,000. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Kansas City's own record, stated plainly in the table.
The migration currents read locally in Kansas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Kansas City, Kansas (Wyandotte County) holds a Black population of roughly a fifth to a quarter of its 165,000 people, with its own historic Black community and the Strawberry Hill and Quindaro districts' deep history — Quindaro was a free-port town of the Underground Railroad era. Independence, Raytown, and Grandview on the Missouri side suburbanized the Black population from the 1970s onward; Grandview and Raytown are now substantially Black suburbs. The general record is background; the local one — Kansas City's, in the table — is the subject.
The Currents Around the Metro
In Kansas City, 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 Kansas City metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. In Kansas City, 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 Kansas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. The community's historic heart is the 18th and Vine district, east of downtown: the center of Black Kansas City from the early twentieth century, when the city's Black population — drawn by the stockyards, railroads, and packinghouses — was confined by covenant and custom to the east side. The museums now housed at 18th and Vine — the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum — institutionalize that record. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Kansas City, but to locate it.
The migration currents read locally in Kansas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. The line's origin in the early twentieth century's development and lending practices is documented in the housing literature, and its persistence is the metro's central demographic fact: Kansas City's overall Black share of 30 percent is, in truth, two cities' figures — an east side at 70 to 90 percent Black and a remainder in the low teens — averaged by a street. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Kansas City; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
Movement into and out of the Kansas City 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 Kansas City, read together with the concentration plate, the movement record explains how the share above came to be, and where it is tending.
Filed in this series as Black Kansas City: Growth and Movement, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Kansas City metro, alone or in combination: 150,000; Black share of the Kansas City metro population, alone or in combination: 30%; Black share of the state population, alone: 11%. In Kansas City, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Kansas are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Kansas City, a reader who needs the underlying counts will find them in the published tables of the source named below, from which every figure here descends without alteration beyond the rounding the source itself applies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Kansas City metro, alone or in combination | 150,000 |
| Black share of the Kansas City metro population, alone or in combination | 30% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 11% |
| 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.