Metro Plates
Black New Orleans: Before and After the Storm
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black New Orleans: the population itself — its size, its share of the metro, and its distribution across the city and suburbs that make up the metropolitan whole.
The distribution reads at state scale in New Orleans, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. 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. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which New Orleans's table states plainly.
The City Before the Storm
The distribution reads at state scale in New Orleans, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. In New Orleans, 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. In New Orleans, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
Displacement: The Census of a Diaspora
For Black New Orleans: Before and After the Storm, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. 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 material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for New Orleans.
The City That Returned
Filed in this series as Black New Orleans: Before and After the Storm, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. Its table records Black residents of New Orleans, approximately: 230,000; the Black share of the city before Hurricane Katrina and in the most recent census — the storm's demographic signature: 67% to 59%. In New Orleans, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
The Metro and the Region
The metropolitan frame softens the city's losses without erasing them. Jefferson Parish, adjoining the city, holds a Black population that grew across the period — Metairie and Kenner's suburbs and the parish's own historic Black communities — and St. Charles, St. John, and the river parishes retain the region's old plantation-belt demography. The metro's Black total, above 400,000, makes greater New Orleans still one of the larger Black populations of the South, and its cultural economy — music, food, festival tourism — employs and expresses the population in proportions no dataset fully captures.
Reading the New Orleans Numbers
New Orleans is the profile where the reader must hold two censuses at once. Quoted from 2000, it is a two-thirds Black city of 325,000 Black residents; quoted from the most recent count, a three-fifths Black city of 230,000. The difference between those sentences is the largest disaster displacement in modern American data — and the partial return since is the measure of the population's attachment to the most distinctive Black city in the nation. Both figures belong in any honest account, with their years attached.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of New Orleans, approximately: 230,000; the Black share of the city before Hurricane Katrina and in the most recent census — the storm's demographic signature: 67% to 59%. For 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.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for New Orleans are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In New Orleans, a reader who needs the underlying counts will find them in the published tables of the source named below, from which every figure here descends without alteration beyond the rounding the source itself applies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of New Orleans, approximately | 230,000 |
| the Black share of the city before Hurricane Katrina and in the most recent census — the storm's demographic signature | 67% to 59% |
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.