Metro Plates
Black Los Angeles: Concentration and Share
In Los Angeles, concentration is the metro question in its purest form: how much of a place is Black, and how that share compares with the state and the nation around it. In the Los Angeles metro, Black residents number about 1 million and form 8.6% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 6% 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 8.6%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. In Los Angeles, 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 Los Angeles 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.
The distribution reads at state scale in Los Angeles, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Los Angeles holds close to a million Black residents across its metropolitan area, but its defining statistic is a share in long decline: Black Angelenos were nearly one in five city residents in the 1970s and are about 8.6 percent of the city today. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Los Angeles's table states plainly.
For Los Angeles, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The community the nation once knew as South Central — formally renamed South Los Angeles by the city — was built by the Great Migration's western stream: defense workers, railroad families, and Southern migrants who settled the flatland grid east of the hills and, restricted by covenants from most of the city, built a complete Black metropolis within it. In Los Angeles, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
Reading This Plate
What separates the two definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of the size recorded in Los Angeles. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like Los Angeles's. Los Angeles's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
In Los Angeles, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The independent cities of the southern plain record the transition in its sharpest local forms. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Los Angeles's particular numbers.
For Los Angeles, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Black Los Angeles in the survey data shows the wide spread characteristic of the coastal metros: some of the highest-income Black communities in the nation — the Baldwin Hills and View Park districts, the so-called Black Beverly Hills, among the most affluent predominantly Black neighborhoods in America — within miles of tracts recording the state's hardest poverty indicators. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Los Angeles's households on the other.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Los Angeles metro, alone or in combination: 1 million; Black share of the Los Angeles metro population, alone or in combination: 8.6%; Black share of the state population, alone: 6%. In Los Angeles, 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.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Los Angeles: Black share of the state population, alone: 6%; Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates): 13.5%. The measures above and these together fix the population of Los Angeles 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 the Los Angeles metro, alone or in combination | 1 million |
| Black share of the Los Angeles metro population, alone or in combination | 8.6% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 6% |
| 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.