Metro Plates
Black Las Vegas: The Westside and the Valley's Growth
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black Las Vegas: the population itself — its size, its share of the metro, and its distribution across the city and suburbs that make up the metropolitan whole.
In Las Vegas, for Las Vegas, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. 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. Las Vegas's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
The Historic Westside
In Las Vegas, 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 Moulin Rouge, opened in 1955 as the city's first integrated casino-hotel on the Westside's edge, marks the era in the record. Held against the national midpoint, Las Vegas's own rows say how its households stand.
The Valley's Dispersal
For Black Las Vegas: The Westside and the Valley's Growth, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. 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. The plate states Las Vegas's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
The Casino Economy's Workforce
This plate takes up its subject directly: Black Las Vegas: The Westside and the Valley's Growth. Its table records Black residents of Clark County (the Las Vegas Valley), approximately: 330,000; Las Vegas's historic Black district, founded when Black workers were barred from living near the Strip they served: The Westside. In Las Vegas, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
Composition and Change
The community's composition mirrors the Valley's: California-born newcomers are the largest stream in the birthplace data, followed by the Midwest and South; African immigrant communities (Ethiopian above all) and Caribbean populations layer in; and the age structure is young against a retiree stream that gives the Valley a growing Black senior population as well. Nevada's Black growth rate ranks with Arizona's at the top of the state table — the two desert metros are, demographically, one phenomenon split by a state line — and the estimates project the Valley's Black population toward a fifth of the county within the planning horizon of its own demographers.
Reading the Las Vegas Numbers
Las Vegas completes the desert pair with Phoenix: a Black population built by an entertainment economy's labor demand, confined in its founding geography, dispersed in its growth. The Westside's data and the suburbs' data are both the profile; the distance between them — a few miles of freeway — is the distance this section exists to measure.
The institutions are catching the growth: UNLV's Black enrollment is the state's largest, the College of Southern Nevada carries the broad base, Black churches anchor every Valley quadrant, and a Black business and media layer (the Nevada Black Chamber's orbit, Black-published media serving the Valley) has grown with the population it serves. The education data add the standing caveat: the Clark County district, among the nation's largest, records Black student outcomes in the pattern of the other big urban systems in this section — the community's central policy file.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of Clark County (the Las Vegas Valley), approximately: 330,000; Las Vegas's historic Black district, founded when Black workers were barred from living near the Strip they served: The Westside. For 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.
In Las Vegas, 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. Where the table carries a national benchmark row for Las Vegas, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of Clark County (the Las Vegas Valley), approximately | 330,000 |
| Las Vegas's historic Black district, founded when Black workers were barred from living near the Strip they served | The Westside |
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.