Metro Plates
Black Miami: Dade, Broward, and the Haitian Capital
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black Miami: the population itself — its size, its share of the metro, and its distribution across the city and suburbs that make up the metropolitan whole.
In Miami, 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. In Miami, 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. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Miami's particular numbers.
Historic Black Miami: Overtown and Liberty City
For Miami, 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. 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. Where the general meets the particular is the table of Miami; read the two together.
The Haitian Capital
In Miami, the distribution reads at state scale in Miami, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Miami; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
Broward: The Suburban Center of Gravity
Here, on the plate for Miami, 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. 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. Held against the national midpoint, Miami's own rows say how its households stand.
Composition and Contrasts
Black Miami's internal range is extreme. The region includes some of the most affluent Black and Caribbean suburban communities in the nation and, in Liberty City and Overtown, neighborhoods whose poverty and health indicators sit at the hard end of this reference's tables — separated by a few miles of expressway. Afro-Cuban and other Afro-Latino populations, counted within the Hispanic statistics in many tables, complicate every Dade County figure quoted without a birthplace split; the county's overall Black share of about 17 percent becomes substantially higher when Black Hispanics are counted with the Black population, as this reference does wherever the data permit.
Reading the Miami Numbers
Growth continues on both of the region's currents: continued Caribbean and Haitian migration into Broward and northern Dade, and the suburban dispersal of the native-born population into the same counties — while climate exposure, in the flood and insurance data, is emerging as a pressure on the low-lying historic districts that this profile's successors will have to track.
Miami completes the first rank of city profiles in this section, and its lesson is the one the Florida state profile announced: composition is destiny in the data. A Black population that is at once native and immigrant, English- and Creole- and Spanish-speaking, suburban-affluent and inner-city poor, cannot be summarized by any single Miami figure — the profile's honest unit is the community, and the county and neighborhood tables beneath this account are built to that scale.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Miami metropolitan area (Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach): 1 Million+; the Miami area holds the largest Haitian population in the United States: Haitian Capital. For 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 metropolitan area (Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach) | 1 Million+ |
| the Miami area holds the largest Haitian population in the United States | Haitian Capital |
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.