Metro Plates
Black Los Angeles: From South Central to the Inland Empire
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black Los Angeles: the population itself — its size, its share of the metro, and its distribution across the city and suburbs that make up the metropolitan whole.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Black Los Angeles: From South Central to the Inland Empire. 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 plate reports what the sources publish for Los Angeles and leaves alone what they do not.
South Los Angeles: The Historic Core
The subject here is Black Los Angeles: From South Central to the Inland Empire, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. Its table records Black residents of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, approximately, alone or in combination: 1 Million; Black share of the city of Los Angeles — down from nearly one in five in the 1970s: 8.6%. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for Los Angeles.
Inglewood, Compton, and the South Bay
In Los Angeles, the distribution reads at state scale in Los Angeles, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. In Los Angeles, the independent cities of the southern plain record the transition in its sharpest local forms. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Los Angeles's own record, stated plainly in the table.
Composition
In Los Angeles, 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. In Los Angeles, 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. Held against the national midpoint, Los Angeles's own rows say how its households stand.
Reading the Los Angeles Numbers
Altadena, Pasadena, and the Valley
Beyond the basin's southern plain, the region's Black geography includes communities of a different character. Altadena, in the foothills above Pasadena, became in the twentieth century one of the nation's notable concentrations of Black homeownership — a community where Black families excluded from Pasadena's housing market bought land and built at high rates, producing ownership levels and an artistic and professional community of lasting record. Pasadena itself holds an old Black community in its northwest. In the San Fernando Valley, Pacoima is among the Valley's oldest Black settlements. These foothill and valley communities, smaller than the South Los Angeles core, record some of the strongest Black economic indicators in the region and complete the metropolitan map.
Los Angeles is the profile where the city, metro, and state figures must be quoted with the most care in this entire section. The city figure — about 340,000 Black residents, 8.6 percent — describes a community in demographic retreat within its historic home. The metro figure — approaching a million — describes a population that largely remains, redistributed across a vast region. And the flow figures describe continued net departure toward Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and the South. All three are the census record of Black Los Angeles, and the profiles of its districts in this section keep them separate.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, approximately, alone or in combination: 1 Million; Black share of the city of Los Angeles — down from nearly one in five in the 1970s: 8.6%. For 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 residents of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, approximately, alone or in combination: 1 Million; Black share of the city of Los Angeles — down from nearly one in five in the 1970s: 8.6%. In Los Angeles, stated together with the measures above, they fix the population this plate describes — its size, its share, and its standing against the national record — and they are the figures the surrounding text interprets, neither rounded further nor carried beyond what the source publishes.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, approximately, alone or in combination | 1 Million |
| Black share of the city of Los Angeles — down from nearly one in five in the 1970s | 8.6% |
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.