Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black New York
The New York metropolitan area holds about 3.4 million Black residents — more than any metro in the nation — and the city itself about two million. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
New York is the capital of Black population in the United States by scale. The metropolitan area holds about 3.4 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — more than any other metropolitan area in the country, and the five boroughs of New York City themselves hold about two million, roughly one in four city residents. No other place in this reference combines so many distinct Black populations in one geography: descendants of the Great Migration from the South, the nation's largest Caribbean immigrant communities, and one of its largest African immigrant populations. This article profiles Black New York in the census data.
In New York, brooklyn holds the largest Black population of the boroughs — approaching one million Black residents — concentrated in its central and eastern neighborhoods, from Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights through Flatbush and East New York, neighborhoods that also form the center of Caribbean New York. Harlem in upper Manhattan remains the historic capital of Black America, its Black population now sharing the neighborhood with substantial new arrivals of other backgrounds. The Bronx holds the city's second great concentration, Queens the most diverse — including the large, heavily homeowner Black communities of southeast Queens, among the highest-income Black neighborhoods in the nation — and the region extends deep into the suburbs: Long Island, Westchester, and the New Jersey cities and suburbs across the Hudson all hold large Black populations inside the metropolitan count.
Plates for This Place
The New York file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 3.4 million Black residents, 24% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state New York anchors, whose Black alone share is 16%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with New York, 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 York in the whole. The facts that fix New York 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 census ancestry and birthplace data distinguish the streams that built Black New York. The first was the Great Migration: Southern Black families arriving from the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia made New York the movement's largest destination and built Harlem's golden age. The second was Caribbean: after immigration law reform in the 1960s, Jamaicans, Haitians, Trinidadians, Guyanese, and Dominicans arrived in the hundreds of thousands, making New York home to the largest Jamaican and Haitian populations outside their home countries. The third, most recent, is African — Nigerian, Ghanaian, Senegalese, and Ethiopian communities among them. Foreign-born Black residents account for roughly a third of the city's Black population, a composition matched by few American cities and documented in this reference's article on the foreign-born Black population.
In New York, survey data show a population of sharp internal contrasts, true of New York in most respects. Black New York includes some of the highest-income Black households in America — in southeast Queens' homeowner districts, in suburban Long Island and New Jersey communities, and in the professional populations of Manhattan and Brooklyn — alongside deep poverty in parts of the Bronx and central Brooklyn, where Black poverty rates exceed the city's high average. Black median household income in the city runs below the Black metro figure precisely because the metro adds the suburbs. Educational attainment is similarly split, reflecting both the city's role as a magnet for credentialed Black professionals and its large population of workers in service employment.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the New York metro arriving here finds the community counted, placed, and connected to its state and national frames in a single page. Placement, not narration, is an entry's work — the narration of New York lives in full on the plates behind this page.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the New York metro, alone or in combination | 3.4 million |
| Black share of the New York metro population | 24% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 16% |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 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.