Metro Plates
Black Los Angeles: Growth and Movement
In Los Angeles, 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 Los Angeles, a metro of about 1 million Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
For Los Angeles, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. For 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. For 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.
In Los Angeles, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Here, on the plate for Los Angeles, the independent cities of the southern plain record the transition in its sharpest local forms. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Los Angeles.
The Currents Around the Metro
In Los Angeles, 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 Los Angeles metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. In Los Angeles, 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.
In Los Angeles, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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 table is where the general pattern becomes Los Angeles's own figures.
Movement into and out of the Los Angeles 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 Los Angeles, 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 Los Angeles, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. In Los Angeles, what the federal record cannot do is count a place's meaning — only its people. In Los Angeles, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
For Los Angeles, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. In Los Angeles, an atlas earns its keep in the comparisons it makes possible. Where the general meets the particular is the table of Los Angeles; read the two together.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — Black Los Angeles: Growth and Movement — because the published record supports one. 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, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
The subject here is Black Los Angeles: Growth and Movement, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. 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%. In Los Angeles, the atlas asks no more of the material than the material can state.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Los Angeles are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Los Angeles, a reader who needs the underlying counts will find them in the published tables of the source named below, from which every figure here descends without alteration beyond the rounding the source itself applies.
| 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.