Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black New Orleans
New Orleans holds about 230,000 Black residents — roughly three in five of the city — remade by Katrina's displacement and a partial return. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
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. No profile in this section carries a before-and-after like this one's. 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 data record both the loss and the partial restoration of one of Black America's foundational cities.
For 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. Its neighborhoods — Tremé, among the oldest Black communities in the nation; the Seventh and Ninth Wards; Uptown's Central City; the lakefront subdivisions of New Orleans East, where a postwar Black middle class built one of the largest concentrations of Black homeownership in the South — formed a complete Black urban world inside a city two-thirds Black.
Plates for This Place
The New Orleans file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 230,000 Black residents, 59% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state New Orleans anchors, whose Black alone share is 33%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with New Orleans, 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 New Orleans in the whole. The facts that fix New Orleans 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.
The flood that followed the levee failures displaced essentially the entire city, and the return was unequal in ways the data measure precisely. The city's population fell by more than half within a year; Black residents, concentrated in the lowest-lying districts — the Lower Ninth Ward above all, and New Orleans East — faced the deepest flooding and the slowest rebuilding, and on the order of one hundred thousand Black New Orleanians had not returned a decade later, even as the city's total population recovered to roughly four-fifths of its pre-storm level. The diaspora remade other cities' data: Houston's Black population carries a permanent Louisiana increment from those years, and Baton Rouge and Atlanta record their own. 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.
In New Orleans, the present data describe a Black New Orleans that is simultaneously continuous and changed. The cultural institutions rebuilt — the parishes, the social aid clubs, the school bands and second lines that demographers of culture treat as the city's operating system — and Black political leadership of the city continued unbroken. The composition shifted beneath the continuity: the returned population is somewhat older and, by the survey medians, somewhat better off on average than the pre-storm population, an arithmetic consequence of who could afford to return and rebuild; in-migration of younger newcomers, of all races, to the city's revived core raised housing costs across the historic districts, and the Black population of the city's center fell even where its cultural presence remained defining. New Orleans East, the great middle-class subdivision, repopulated substantially but incompletely, its retail and institutional infrastructure lagging its rooftops in the survey data.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the New Orleans 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 New Orleans as for every entry.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the New Orleans metro, alone or in combination | 230,000 |
| Black share of the New Orleans metro population | 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.