Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Miami
Greater Miami holds more than a million Black residents — African American, Haitian, Jamaican, and Afro-Latino — the most Caribbean Black metropolis in America. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
For 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. Haitians form the largest single Black nationality in the region and the largest Haitian community in the United States; Jamaicans, Bahamians, Trinidadians, and Afro-Latino populations layer over a native Black community as old as the city itself. The result is a Black metropolis that operates in English, Haitian Creole, French, and Spanish, and whose data require the birthplace splits this reference applies in every South Florida figure.
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. Liberty City, built from the 1930s as one of the nation's first Black public-housing communities and growing into a large residential district, became the center of gravity; Brownsville, Coconut Grove's historic Black village (older than the city around it), Little Haiti, and Miami Gardens — today the largest majority-Black city in Florida, incorporated in the twenty-first century with a Black population above 100,000 — complete the county's Black map.
Plates for This Place
The Miami file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 1 million Black residents, 17% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Miami anchors, whose Black alone share is 16%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Miami, 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 Miami in the whole. The facts that fix Miami 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.
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. The region's Haitian population — immigrants and their American-born children — numbers in the several hundred thousands, the largest concentration outside Haiti itself, large enough that Haitian Creole is a language of Miami-Dade's public life: of its ballots, its school system, its radio market, and its health clinics. The survey data show the community's classic immigrant arc — high labor participation, strong family structure, rising second-generation attainment — against the legal precarity that has shadowed Haitian status in federal policy across the decades.
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. Palm Beach County adds Delray Beach, Riviera Beach, Belle Glade, and West Palm Beach's historic Black communities. The metro's Black median rises as its geography suburbanizes — Broward's Black household incomes run above Dade's in the survey data, with the immigrant communities' second generations driving the increase.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Miami 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 Miami as for every entry.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Miami metro, alone or in combination | 1 million |
| Black share of the Miami metro population | 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.