Metro Plates
Black Miami: Concentration and Share
In Miami, 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 Miami metro, Black residents number about 1 million and form 17% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 16% 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 17%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. In Miami, 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 Miami 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 Miami, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. The Miami metropolitan area — Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties — holds more than one million Black residents, and no large American metro's Black population is more Caribbean. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Miami's table states plainly.
The distribution reads at state scale in Miami, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Miami was incorporated in 1896 with Black laborers — many of them Bahamian — forming a large share of the workforce that built it and of the men permitted to sign its charter. The Black community was confined to Colored Town, renamed Overtown, which became a flourishing entertainment and business district — the Harlem of the South in its own billing — until highway construction in the 1960s drove interstates through its center, dispersing thousands of households. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Miami, but to locate it.
Reading This Plate
What separates the two definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of the size recorded in Miami. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like Miami's. Miami's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
In Miami, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Haitian migration, accelerating from the 1970s through the boat-lift era and after, built Little Haiti around Miami's Northeast Second Avenue and extended through North Miami, North Miami Beach, and deep into Broward County. Held against the national ladder, Miami's own rows say where its attainment stands.
The distribution reads at state scale in Miami, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Broward County, centered on Fort Lauderdale, holds a Black population rivaling Dade's in size — roughly a quarter to a third of the county across its cities — and it is the region's suburban Black center: Lauderhill, majority Black and heavily Caribbean, bills itself accordingly; Lauderdale Lakes, Miramar, Pembroke Pines, Sunrise, and Plantation hold large and growing Black populations of homeowners. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Miami stands so the plate can be read.
The gazetteer pages of this atlas gather the Miami file in one place — the metro plates, the state plates for its state, and the national plates that frame both. In Miami, concentration is the thread that runs through all of them: it is why this metro carries the weight it does in the national distribution, and why its movements, gains and losses alike, register in the national counts when they come.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Miami metro, alone or in combination: 1 million; Black share of the Miami metro population, alone or in combination: 17%; Black share of the state population, alone: 16%. In Miami, 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.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Miami metro, alone or in combination | 1 million |
| Black share of the Miami metro population, alone or in combination | 17% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 16% |
| 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.