Metro Plates
Black Philadelphia: Two in Five of the City of Brotherly Love
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black Philadelphia: the population itself — its size, its share of the metro, and its distribution across the city and suburbs that make up the metropolitan whole.
In Philadelphia, the distribution reads at state scale in Philadelphia, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Philadelphia; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The Oldest Northern Roots
In Philadelphia, for Philadelphia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. 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. In Philadelphia, 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 Neighborhood Map
For Philadelphia, for Philadelphia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The modern city's Black geography is comprehensive. Philadelphia's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
Institutions and Employment
The subject here is Black Philadelphia: Two in Five of the City of Brotherly Love, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. 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 plate reports what the sources publish for Philadelphia and leaves alone what they do not.
Composition and Change
The city's Black population was roughly stable across the most recent censuses while the metro's grew — the suburbanization arithmetic of the section generally — and its composition is layering: one of the East Coast's larger African immigrant communities (Liberian above all, concentrated in the Southwest and Delaware County) and a long-established Caribbean population joined the native-born base. Gentrification pressure in the districts adjoining Center City and University City appears in the tract data as declining Black counts in historically Black neighborhoods even as the city's total Black population holds — the displacement pattern, in measured form, that several profiles in this section record.
Reading the Philadelphia Numbers
Philadelphia is the profile of depth without growth: the North's most historic Black population, still its third-largest urban concentration, holding its numbers while the growth metros multiply theirs. Its figures reward the long view — institutions founded in the eighteenth century still anchoring neighborhoods, a homeownership tradition surviving on modest incomes — and its difficulties are the section's most documented case that cultural and political depth do not by themselves move the income tables.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the City of Philadelphia, approximately: 680,000; Black residents of the Philadelphia metropolitan area: 1.35 Million. For 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.
The record behind this plate of Philadelphia 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 Philadelphia, 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 Philadelphia: Black residents of the City of Philadelphia, approximately: 680,000; Black residents of the Philadelphia metropolitan area: 1.35 Million. In Philadelphia, 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 Philadelphia, approximately | 680,000 |
| Black residents of the Philadelphia metropolitan area | 1.35 Million |
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.