Metro Plates
Black Newark: Half the Brick City
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black Newark: the population itself — its size, its share of the metro, and its distribution across the city and suburbs that make up the metropolitan whole.
This plate takes up its subject directly: Black Newark: Half the Brick City. 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, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
The Central Ward and the Making of Black Newark
In Newark, the distribution reads at state scale in Newark, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Newark; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The Wards Today
For Newark, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. 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. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Newark's attainment on the other.
The Essex Suburbs: The Other Half of the Story
In Newark, 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. 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. Held against the national midpoint, Newark's own rows say how its households stand.
Composition and Change
Newark's population has grown across the last two censuses — the city passed 300,000 again — and its Black population with it, joined by one of the Northeast's larger African immigrant communities (Nigerian and Ghanaian above all) and a long-established Caribbean population. The Black share edges down as the Latino population grows faster, in the corridor pattern. The indicators record the city's split state: downtown investment and a rising median in the renewal districts, against a citywide Black poverty rate still near a quarter and health outcomes at the hard end of the state's tables — the two Newarks that every local dataset describes.
Reading the Newark Numbers
Newark is best read as a county profile wearing a city's name: 160,000 Black residents in the city, 140,000 more in its immediate suburbs, one labor market, one housing history. The Brick City's data improve as the frame widens — and the tracts keep the honest account of where the revival has and has not arrived.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the City of Newark, approximately: 160,000; Black residents of Essex County — city and suburbs together: 300,000. For 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.
The record behind this plate of Newark is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Where the table carries a national benchmark row for Newark, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Newark: Black residents of the City of Newark, approximately: 160,000; Black residents of Essex County — city and suburbs together: 300,000. In Newark, stated together with the measures above, they fix the population this plate describes — its size, its share, and its standing against the national record — and they are the figures the surrounding text interprets, neither rounded further nor carried beyond what the source publishes.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the City of Newark, approximately | 160,000 |
| Black residents of Essex County — city and suburbs together | 300,000 |
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.