Metro Plates
Black Las Vegas: Growth and Movement
In Las Vegas, 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 Las Vegas, a metro of about 330,000 Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
In Las Vegas, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Las Vegas.
The migration currents read locally in Las Vegas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Las Vegas; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The migration currents read locally in Las Vegas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. In Las Vegas, 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. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Las Vegas's table states plainly.
The Currents Around the Metro
In Las Vegas, 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 Las Vegas metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. In Las Vegas, 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 Las Vegas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Las Vegas stands so the plate can be read.
Movement into and out of the Las Vegas 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 Las Vegas, read together with the concentration plate, the movement record explains how the share above came to be, and where it is tending.
The migration currents read locally in Las Vegas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. In Las Vegas, the figures here are the published ones, rounded as the source agencies round them, and they describe the population as the federal record counts it: residents, in place, on the reference dates of the census and the survey. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Las Vegas's own record, stated plainly in the table.
The subject here is Black Las Vegas: Growth and Movement, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. 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%. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for Las Vegas.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — Black Las Vegas: Growth and Movement — because the published record supports one. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. In Las Vegas, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
| 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.