Metro Plates
Black Las Vegas: Concentration and Share
Where the general meets the particular is the table of Las Vegas; read the two together. In the Las Vegas metro, Black residents number about 330,000 and form 14.5% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 10% for the state as a whole on the alone count, and 13.5% for the United States.
The Share and What It Builds
A share is not a statistic in the abstract; at 14.5%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. In Las Vegas, shares at this level sustain institutions — media, congregations, businesses, and political organizations — that smaller shares cannot, and they shape how a metro appears in every national table this atlas publishes. The Las Vegas figure also explains the metro's gravitational pull in the movement plates: concentration is itself an attraction, drawing new residents toward an established community with its institutions already built.
In Las Vegas, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The Las Vegas Valley — Clark County — holds about 330,000 Black residents, roughly one in seven of its 2.3 million people, the large majority of Black Nevada. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Las Vegas's particular numbers.
The distribution reads at state scale in Las Vegas, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. The Moulin Rouge, opened in 1955 as the city's first integrated casino-hotel on the Westside's edge, marks the era in the record. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Las Vegas, but to locate it.
Reading This Plate
What separates the two definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of the size recorded in Las Vegas. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like Las Vegas's. Las Vegas's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
For Las Vegas, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. North Las Vegas, the independent city north of the core, is roughly a fifth Black — one of the largest Black suburban cities in the West — with deep homeowner districts from the 1970s onward. In Las Vegas, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national currents on one side, the state's arrivals and departures on the other.
In Las Vegas, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Employment in Black Las Vegas runs through the hospitality economy that employs the Valley generally — the resorts' culinary, housekeeping, security, and entertainment workforces, substantially unionized on the Culinary Workers' model, which the labor data record as among the strongest private-sector wage floors for service work in the nation — and through the public sector, health care, logistics (the Valley is a distribution node for the whole Southwest), and Nellis Air Force Base's military economy. In Las Vegas, held against the national pattern, the state's own rows say how its coverage stands.
The gazetteer pages of this atlas gather the Las Vegas file in one place — the metro plates, the state plates for its state, and the national plates that frame both. In Las Vegas, concentration is the thread that runs through all of them: it is why this metro carries the weight it does in the national distribution, and why its movements, gains and losses alike, register in the national counts when they come.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Las Vegas metro, alone or in combination: 330,000; Black share of the Las Vegas metro population, alone or in combination: 14.5%; Black share of the state population, alone: 10%. In Las Vegas, 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 Las Vegas is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so Las Vegas is compared on one measure and one basis only.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Las Vegas metro, alone or in combination | 330,000 |
| Black share of the Las Vegas metro population, alone or in combination | 14.5% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 10% |
| 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.