Metro Plates
Black Population in Petersburg, Virginia
Petersburg is an independent city of about 33,200 people on the Appomattox River in south-central Virginia, twenty-five miles south of Richmond — and about 74 percent of its residents are Black, one of the highest shares of any city in Virginia. Petersburg's Black community is among the oldest urban Black communities in the United States: free Black families were established there before the Revolution, and the city became a center of free Black life in the slave South. Virginia State University, the historically Black land-grant university founded in 1882, stands in neighboring Ettrick as the community's anchor institution. This article profiles Petersburg's Black population in the census data: its size, its exceptional historical depth, and its present economy.
Size and Share
The 2020 census counted roughly 24,600 Black residents in Petersburg, a share of about 74 percent. The city sits inside the Richmond metropolitan area, whose Black population exceeds 400,000, but Petersburg's concentration is distinct from the capital's: where Richmond is about 40 percent Black, Petersburg's three-quarters majority reflects its own particular history — a tobacco and manufacturing city whose white population suburbanized into Chesterfield and Dinwiddie counties while its Black community remained. The city's total population fell sharply in the late twentieth century, from above 40,000 to near 30,000, and has recovered modestly since; through the whole cycle the Black population has been the city's stable core, the community that held its neighborhoods, churches, and institutions together across the downturn.
One of America's Oldest Black Cities
The roots of Black Petersburg run to the colonial period. Free Black residents were recorded in the area from the eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century Petersburg held one of the largest free Black populations in the South — artisans, tobacco workers, watermen, and tradespeople, worshipping at churches like Gillfield Baptist, founded in the 1780s and among the oldest Black congregations in America. Pocahontas Island, the city's river neighborhood settled by free Black families in the 1730s and among the oldest continuously inhabited free Black communities in the nation, remains a living neighborhood and a National Register district. Enslaved Petersburgers worked the tobacco warehouses of the Appomattox; after emancipation the community built schools and businesses, and in 1882 the state founded Virginia State University just across the line in Ettrick — the first fully state-supported four-year institution for Black students in the United States. The census's 74 percent is thus the modern measure of a community with nearly three centuries of continuous urban presence.
Income, the University, and the Richmond Economy
Petersburg's median household income is about $42,000, roughly 22 percent of residents live in poverty, and about 17 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher — figures that place it in the middle band of Virginia's cities and above most of the majority-Black cities in this reference, reflecting its place in a metropolitan economy. The city's employment anchors are Virginia State University, Southside Regional Medical Center, the federal presence at nearby Fort Gregg-Adams — one of the Army's principal logistics installations, in adjacent Prince George County — and commuting into the Richmond economy. Recent years have brought renewed investment attention to the city's historic downtown and its pharmaceutical-manufacturing corridor. For its Black population, the data describe a durable urban majority: a community of exceptional historical continuity, anchored by a major Black university, working within — and steadily helping to rebuild — a small industrial city on the Appomattox. The city's Black institutions extend well beyond the university. Its historic Black churches, some with congregations dating to the eighteenth century, still anchor neighborhood life, and its Black-owned businesses line stretches of its older commercial streets. Petersburg's schools, its city government, and its civic organizations draw their leadership from the same community the census counts — a Black population that has governed the city's daily life for generations and that now leads its redevelopment debates as well. In the regional data, Petersburg consistently reads as the Richmond metro's most concentrated Black community: a place where Black history is not a district or a museum but the city's whole fabric, from Pocahontas Island to the university gates. The surrounding county data complete the portrait: the independent city sits amid Southside counties whose Black shares run from a fifth to nearly half, and Petersburg's 74 percent is the peak of that regional pattern — the urban concentration of one of Virginia's oldest Black regions.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| median household income | $42,000 |
| of residents live below the poverty line | 22% |
| of Petersburg's residents are Black | 74% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Petersburg city, Virginia 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.