Metro Plates
Black Newark: Growth and Movement
In Newark, 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 Newark, a metro of about 160,000 Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
For Newark, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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 comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national currents on one side, the state's arrivals and departures on the other.
The migration currents read locally in Newark, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Newark stands so the plate can be read.
For Newark, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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 comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Newark's households on the other.
The Currents Around the Metro
In Newark, 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 Newark metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. In Newark, 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.
The migration currents read locally in Newark, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. Not to rank Newark but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
Movement into and out of the Newark metro is measured in the federal record as the difference between counts, and its streams — births and deaths inside the metro, arrivals from other American places, arrivals from abroad — are published separately in the estimates program. In Newark, read together with the concentration plate, the movement record explains how the share above came to be, and where it is tending.
The subject here is Black Newark: Growth and Movement, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. 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, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
How this plate is read, for Newark: 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 Newark metro, alone or in combination: 160,000; Black share of the Newark metro population, alone or in combination: 52%. In Newark, 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 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.