Metro Plates
Black Philadelphia: Concentration and Share
Where the general meets the particular is the table of Philadelphia; read the two together. In the Philadelphia metro, Black residents number about 680,000 and form 44% of the population on the alone-or-in-combination count — against 11% 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 44%, it is the composition of every school, congregation, electorate-sized gathering, and customer base in the metro. In Philadelphia, 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 Philadelphia 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 Philadelphia, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Philadelphia holds about 680,000 Black residents within the city — Black alone or in combination, more than two in five of its 1.6 million people — and about 1.35 million across the metropolitan region. In Philadelphia, held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
The distribution reads at state scale in Philadelphia, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Philadelphia's Black history begins at the nation's founding: the city held one of the largest free Black populations of the early republic, and its institutions were prototypes — Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in the 1790s on land still held today, is the mother church of the first Black denomination; the Free African Society organized mutual aid a decade before 1800. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Philadelphia, but to locate it.
Reading This Plate
What separates the two definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of the size recorded in Philadelphia. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like Philadelphia's. Philadelphia's place in that ordering is its concentration signature.
In Philadelphia, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The modern city's Black geography is comprehensive. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Philadelphia's particular numbers.
For Philadelphia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The institutional layer is anchored educationally by Cheyney University — founded in 1837, the nation's oldest historically Black institution — in the western suburbs, and by Lincoln University beyond them, with Temple and the city's universities carrying the large modern enrollments. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Philadelphia's households on the other.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Philadelphia metro, alone or in combination: 680,000; Black share of the Philadelphia metro population, alone or in combination: 44%; Black share of the state population, alone: 11%. In Philadelphia, 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 Philadelphia: Black share of the state population, alone: 11%; Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates): 13.5%. The measures above and these together fix the population of Philadelphia 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.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Philadelphia are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Philadelphia, a reader who needs the underlying counts will find them in the published tables of the source named below, from which every figure here descends without alteration beyond the rounding the source itself applies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Philadelphia metro, alone or in combination | 680,000 |
| Black share of the Philadelphia metro population, alone or in combination | 44% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 11% |
| 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.