Metro Plates
Black Population in Natchez, Mississippi
Natchez is a city of about 14,200 people on the high bluffs of the Mississippi River in Adams County — the oldest permanent European settlement on the river, founded by the French in 1716 — and about 65 percent of its residents are Black. In the decades before the Civil War, Natchez held one of the largest concentrations of enslaved people in the United States, and its Forks of the Road was among the largest slave markets in the South; the Black community that endured there, enslaved and free, built one of the deepest Black histories of any small city in America. Today Natchez's Black majority sustains that history — in its churches, its historic sites, and its civic life. This article profiles the city's Black population in the census data.
Size and Share
The 2020 census counted roughly 9,200 Black residents in Natchez, about 65 percent of the city, in an Adams County that is about 56 percent Black. The city's total population has declined from above 20,000 in the late twentieth century, following the contraction of its manufacturing base, but its Black majority has been a constant: Natchez was a majority-Black place in the slave era, in the sharecropping era, and in the present. The city's Black population includes one of the South's most historically distinguished communities — descendants of the free people of color who, before emancipation, formed a small propertied class in Natchez, of whom William Johnson, the diarist known as the Barber of Natchez, is the best documented. That lineage — a Black community with free and enslaved branches documented in unusual depth — gives Natchez's demography a recorded texture few cities can match.
Forks of the Road and the World It Made
The demographic weight of Black Natchez was set by the cotton kingdom at its richest. In the 1850s the Natchez district's plantations produced immense fortunes, and the Forks of the Road market, just outside the city, was one of the largest sites of the domestic slave trade in the United States — the place where thousands of people brought down the river from the upper South were sold into the cotton fields of Mississippi and Louisiana. The city's celebrated antebellum mansions, which anchor its tourism today, stand on that foundation, and Natchez's public history has increasingly reckoned with the fact: the Forks of the Road site is now interpreted as a place of memory, and the city's Black heritage — its churches, its Rhythm Night Club memorial, the home of Richard Wright, who spent part of his boyhood in Natchez — is presented as central to the city's story. The Black population of the census is the descendant community of that world: the people who were traded at the Forks, worked the district's plantations, and built, after freedom, the institutions — schools, congregations, businesses — that still structure Black Natchez.
Income, Tourism, and the River Economy
Natchez's median household income is about $34,000, roughly 27 percent of residents live in poverty, and about 17 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher. The economy rests on the heritage tourism that its architecture and history draw — the spring and fall pilgrimages to its historic houses are among the oldest house-tour traditions in America — together with health care, the schools and county government, river-related industry, and the remaining manufacturing in Adams County. Alcorn State University, the historically Black land-grant university, lies about forty miles north at Lorman, and Natchez's Black professional and civic life connects to it closely. The census profile, in sum, is of a small majority-Black city of outsized historical depth, whose Black population — 65 percent — is at once the heir of the cotton kingdom's labor force and the custodian of one of America's most significant landscapes of memory. Adams County's tables widen the lens. The county's Black share, about 56 percent, is carried between Natchez itself and a countryside of small communities whose churches and family cemeteries record the same plantation-era settlement as the city's, and the county's Black families move between the two as one community. Natchez's heritage economy increasingly reflects that community's custodianship: Black guides, historians, and site interpreters now shape how the city's story is told to its visitors, and the Forks of the Road commemoration stands as a city landmark raised by descendant advocacy. The demographic and the historical, in Natchez, are the same fact viewed from two sides.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| median household income | $34,000 |
| of residents live below the poverty line | 27% |
| of Natchez's residents are Black | 65% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Natchez city, Mississippi 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.