Metro Plates
Black New Orleans: Concentration and Share
In New Orleans, 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 New Orleans metro, Black residents number about 230,000 and form 59% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 33% 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 59%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. In New Orleans, 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 New Orleans 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.
For New Orleans, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. New Orleans holds about 230,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination, roughly three in five of the city's 384,000 people — and a metropolitan Black population above 400,000. In the census of 2000, New Orleans was two-thirds Black, a city of 484,000; Hurricane Katrina's flood in 2005 emptied it, and the population that returned over the following fifteen years was smaller and differently composed. New Orleans's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
For New Orleans, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Black New Orleans before Katrina was the product of three centuries: a colonial city where free people of color held property and formed militias under French and Spanish rule; the greatest slave market of the domestic trade; and then, after emancipation, a Black working-class city of extraordinary cultural generation — the birthplace of jazz in its Tremé and Seventh Ward neighborhoods, of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, of second-line parades and social aid and pleasure clubs, institutions built by and for the Black working class. Where the general meets the particular is the table of New Orleans; read the two together.
Reading This Plate
What separates the two definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of the size recorded in New Orleans. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like New Orleans's. New Orleans's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
For New Orleans, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The demographic consequence inside the city was a Black share falling from 67 percent to about 59 percent in combination, and a Black population smaller by roughly a fifth than the one the storm displaced. The general material becomes a specific place in the table below, in New Orleans's rows.
In New Orleans, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The present data describe a Black New Orleans that is simultaneously continuous and changed. Held against the national midpoint, New Orleans's own rows say how its households stand.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the New Orleans metro, alone or in combination: 230,000; Black share of the New Orleans metro population, alone or in combination: 59%; Black share of the state population, alone: 33%. In New Orleans, 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.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of New Orleans: Black share of the state population, alone: 33%; Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates): 13.5%. The measures above and these together fix the population of New Orleans as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the New Orleans metro, alone or in combination | 230,000 |
| Black share of the New Orleans metro population, alone or in combination | 59% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 33% |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; 2000 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.