Black Belt & Regions
Black Population in Louisiana: One in Three, Rooted Deep
Filed in this series as Black Population in Louisiana: One in Three, Rooted Deep, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. Its table records Black residents of Louisiana, alone or in combination: 1.55 Million; nearly one in three Louisianans is Black — second-highest share of any large state: 1 in 3. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for Louisiana.
In Louisiana, read as a region, the pattern crosses the state borders the other plates observe, and the table below fixes its measures. Louisiana holds about 1.55 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in three of its people, with Black alone at about 1.46 million, or 31 percent. Louisiana's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
Three Louisianas
For Louisiana, read as a region, the pattern crosses the state borders the other plates observe, and the table below fixes its measures. The state's Black geography divides into three regions. General material becomes a specific place in one spot on this plate: the table below, in the rows that belong to Louisiana.
Baton Rouge and the Urban Map
Baton Rouge, the capital, is a majority-Black city — roughly 55 percent within its limits — and home to Southern University, the nation's largest historically Black university system flagship by the system's accounting, and to a state-government and petrochemical workforce. New Orleans, profiled in full in the cities section, is the state's largest Black population center. Together with Shreveport and the suburban rings of each, the urban parishes hold the large majority of Black Louisianans while the rural parishes hold the highest shares — the recurring Southern pattern, in a state whose rural Black culture, from the Delta blues fringe to the Creole trail-ride country, retains an outsized influence on the whole.
Roots: The Most Layered Descent in America
Here, on the plate for Louisiana, read as a region, the pattern crosses the state borders the other plates observe, and the table below fixes its measures. The ancestry data record Louisiana's uniqueness. Below are the rows where the general becomes specific — they are Louisiana's own, tabled for exactly that turn.
Composition and Change
In Louisiana, the regional series holds its geography whole; the state plates elsewhere in the atlas divide the same ground by state lines. In Louisiana, the state's Black indicators record difficulty alongside depth: income and poverty figures at the hard end of the national distributions, health outcomes that anchor the difficult end of this reference's public health tables, and an age structure marked by the departure of young adults to Texas — Houston above all, a few hours west, whose Black population includes one of the largest Louisiana-born communities in the nation. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Louisiana, but to locate it.
Reading the Louisiana Numbers
Louisiana's profile completes the Deep South sequence of this section — Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia before it — and the comparison is the lesson: the five states share the plantation foundation and diverge in everything since, in growth, in institutions, and in the data's present tense. Louisiana's figures should be read with its layers in mind: the state average blends a Creole metropolis, a French southwest, and a Delta north that resemble three different regions of Black America, because historically they were.
Read for Louisiana, read as a region, the pattern crosses the state borders the other plates observe, and the table below fixes its measures. In Louisiana, the parish profiles beneath this state account carry the local figures for the river parishes, Acadiana, and the northern tier. In Louisiana, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of Louisiana, alone or in combination: 1.55 Million; nearly one in three Louisianans is Black — second-highest share of any large state: 1 in 3. In Louisiana, 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.
How this plate is read, for Louisiana: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black residents of Louisiana, alone or in combination: 1.55 Million; nearly one in three Louisianans is Black — second-highest share of any large state: 1 in 3. In Louisiana, the two presentations are one record in two forms, and a reader who checks one against the other has the plate's whole method in hand.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of Louisiana, alone or in combination | 1.55 Million |
| nearly one in three Louisianans is Black — second-highest share of any large state | 1 in 3 |
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.