Metro Plates
Black Newark: Concentration and Share
In Newark, 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 Newark metro, Black residents number about 160,000 and form 52% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 14% 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 52%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. In Newark, 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 Newark 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.
In Newark, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Newark holds about 160,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination, roughly half of the city's 311,000 people — and sits at the center of an Essex County Black population of about 300,000, the densest Black county landscape in the Northeast outside the five boroughs. In Newark, held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
In Newark, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The 1967 rebellion, centered in the Central Ward, became the hinge of the city's modern history in the data: the population, 375,000 at mid-century, fell to under 280,000 within two decades; white and middle-class Black departure to the suburbs accelerated together; and the ward's built fabric thinned through abandonment and clearance. Where the general meets the particular is the table of Newark; 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 Newark. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like Newark's. Newark's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
In Newark, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The South Ward, the largest Black population center, holds the stable homeowner districts of Weequahic — once the city's Jewish middle-class heartland, Black since the 1960s, with its park and its high school's famous alumni — and Clinton Hill. Held against the national ladder, Newark's own rows say where its attainment stands.
The distribution reads at state scale in Newark, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Half of Black Essex County lives outside Newark, in the suburban landscape the state profile names: East Orange and Irvington, each more than four-fifths Black, each a full city of 60,000 to 65,000 with its own Black civic infrastructure generations deep; Orange; Montclair, the region's showcase integrated suburb; and the Caldwells, Bloomfield, and West Orange with growing shares. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Newark, but to locate it.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Newark metro, alone or in combination: 160,000; Black share of the Newark metro population, alone or in combination: 52%; Black share of the state population, alone: 14%. In Newark, 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 Newark: Black share of the state population, alone: 14%; Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates): 13.5%. The measures above and these together fix the population of Newark 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 Newark metro, alone or in combination | 160,000 |
| Black share of the Newark metro population, alone or in combination | 52% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 14% |
| 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.