Metro Plates
Black New Orleans: Growth and Movement
In New Orleans, metros are where the national movement story is actually decided — the gains and losses of a few dozen large communities add up to the country's direction. This plate reads the movement record of Black New Orleans, a metro of about 230,000 Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
The migration currents read locally in New Orleans, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. For New Orleans, the present data describe a Black New Orleans that is simultaneously continuous and changed. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank New Orleans, but to locate it.
In New Orleans, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into New Orleans's particular numbers.
The Currents Around the Metro
In New Orleans, the present era's currents run in several directions at once: toward the South and its suburbs, out of the highest-cost coastal metros, and into mid-sized metros whose Black populations are growing fastest in percentage terms. The New Orleans metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. In New Orleans, each decennial census and each survey year revises the picture at the margin; the direction of the lines is the story, and this plate is built to be re-read as the lines extend.
For New Orleans, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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. It is in the rows below — New Orleans's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
The migration currents read locally in New Orleans, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Here, on the plate 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. For New Orleans, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
In New Orleans, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of New Orleans.
Filed in this series as Black New Orleans: Growth and Movement, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. 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%. The plate reports what the sources publish for New Orleans and leaves alone what they do not.
How this plate is read, for New Orleans: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — 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%. In New Orleans, the two presentations are one record in two forms, and a reader who checks one against the other has the plate's whole method in hand.
| 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.