Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Newark
Newark holds about 160,000 Black residents — half the city — at the center of Essex County's great Black suburban landscape. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
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. Newark's Black community was built by the Great Migration into the Central Ward, remade by the rebellion-era upheavals and the suburban exodus that followed, and is now the anchor of a city in partial, uneven revival. This article profiles the population in the census data.
Black Newark's historic center is the Central Ward — the Third Ward of the older maps — where the migration-era community concentrated around Springfield Avenue's commercial strip: the churches, the Krueger-Scott mansion's era of Black business aspiration, the jazz clubs, and the dense blocks of the old Jewish and then Black west side. 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. What replaced it, across the following generation, was substantial public and subsidized housing construction and then, in the recent decades, market-rate infill — the Central Ward today is again the city's most-built district, its census tracts showing the section's familiar two-speed pattern.
Plates for This Place
The Newark file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 160,000 Black residents, 52% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Newark anchors, whose Black alone share is 14%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Newark, 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 Newark in the whole. The facts that fix Newark 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 modern city's Black geography spans all five wards with different characters. 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 West Ward (Vailsburg, Ivy Hill) is the city's most suburban-feeling Black landscape, adjoining the Essex suburbs. The North Ward, historically Italian, is now substantially Latino with a significant Black population; the East Ward, the Ironbound, is the Portuguese and Latino district. The Central Ward remains the institutional center: Rutgers-Newark and NJIT, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the public library's Charles F. Cummings branch with its New Jersey Hispanic and African American collections — the downtown revival's anchors sit inside the historic Black ward's boundaries.
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. The county's aggregate data therefore resist summary: Black Essex contains both some of New Jersey's most difficult neighborhood indicators (in Newark's and East Orange's hardest tracts) and some of its strongest Black suburban medians. The port and airport economy — Port Newark-Elizabeth and Newark Liberty, among the largest employment complexes on the East Coast — and the logistics belt along the Turnpike employ the county's Black workforce at every tier, while the Manhattan-facing professional class commutes from the suburbs through Penn Station.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Newark 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 Newark as for every entry.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Newark metro, alone or in combination | 160,000 |
| Black share of the Newark metro population | 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.