Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Los Angeles
The Los Angeles metro holds close to a million Black residents — a shrinking share of a vast region, dispersing from historic South Los Angeles to the Inland Empire. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
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 population has not vanished — it has dispersed, to the Inland Empire, the Antelope Valley, Las Vegas, and the South — while Los Angeles itself has become a plurality-Latino and increasingly Asian metropolis. This article profiles what the census records as one of the most consequential redistributions in Black urban America.
In Los Angeles, 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. Central Avenue's jazz corridor, the churches, the businesses of Crenshaw and Leimert Park — the last of these still the cultural center of Black Los Angeles — are its institutional remains. Watts, Florence-Firestone, Willowbrook, and the unincorporated county communities around them remain majority or plurality Black in many tracts, even as the wider district's population has become majority Latino across recent census cycles.
Plates for This Place
The Los Angeles file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 1 million Black residents, 8.6% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Los Angeles anchors, whose Black alone share is 6%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Los Angeles, and every plate named above is one shelf away.
A gazetteer is the oldest part of any atlas — the index of places, with the facts that fix Los Angeles in the whole. The facts that fix Los Angeles are its size within Black America, its share of its own ground, and its position in the national pattern of concentration: a metro whose Black community is large enough, and established enough, to appear in every national table the federal record publishes. Those are the coordinates. The plates give them depth.
For Los Angeles, the independent cities of the southern plain record the transition in its sharpest local forms. Inglewood, about two-fifths Black with a large Latino population, has been transformed by stadium and arena development into one of the most watched gentrification cases in the census data. Compton — in Black cultural memory a byword for Black Los Angeles — is now majority Latino, its Black share fallen below a third, a change that arrived within a single generation. Long Beach, the region's second city, holds a Black population near an eighth of its people, with deep roots in the Navy economy. The direction of Black settlement in the basin has meanwhile run east and north: to the Inland Empire's Moreno Valley, Rialto, and Fontana, and to Lancaster and Palmdale in the Antelope Valley, where Black homebuyers traded the basin's prices for desert space, in the pattern the California state profile documents.
For 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. The population is predominantly native-born and Southern-rooted, with smaller Caribbean and African immigrant communities than the eastern gateways. Entertainment and media give Black Los Angeles a cultural weight vastly beyond its demographic share, which the population data alone would never predict — a standing caution of this section against reading cultural prominence as population scale.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Los Angeles metro arriving here finds the community counted, placed, and connected to its state and national frames in a single page. Holding the structure still while the numbers move is the gazetteer's work — the only way an atlas stays honest across editions, for Los Angeles as for every entry.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Los Angeles metro, alone or in combination | 1 million |
| Black share of the Los Angeles metro population | 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.