Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black Philadelphia
Philadelphia holds about 680,000 Black residents in the city and 1.35 million across the metro — one of the oldest and largest Black populations in the North. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
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. It is one of the oldest Black populations in the North: free Black Philadelphians built the nation's first independent Black churches while slavery still existed blocks away, and the city received the Great Migration's earliest waves up the Atlantic coast. The modern data describe a Black metropolis of deep institutions and stark internal divides, spread across rowhouse neighborhoods and an increasingly suburban ring.
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. Abolitionist networks, Black newspapers, and convention movements ran through the city across the nineteenth century, and the Seventh Ward — mapped famously at the century's end in the first great empirical study of Black urban life, conducted from the University of Pennsylvania — held a Black professional class of national standing. Slavery's proximity (the city bordered slave states, and its port traded with them) and periodic violence against Black residents mark the record the historians document alongside the achievement.
Plates for This Place
The Philadelphia file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 680,000 Black residents, 44% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state Philadelphia anchors, whose Black alone share is 11%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with Philadelphia, 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 Philadelphia in the whole. The facts that fix Philadelphia 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 is comprehensive. North Philadelphia — from the historic Seventh Ward's successors around South Street to the vast rowhouse grids of Tioga, Nicetown, and Logan — holds the largest concentration; West Philadelphia, with its Victorian housing stock and the University City edge, is the second; Southwest Philadelphia and the far Northeast add growing, increasingly immigrant-influenced districts; Germantown and Mount Airy in the northwest preserve the city's most famously integrated, middle-class Black communities, some of them Black for a century. The suburban ring holds the growth: Delaware County's Upper Darby and Yeadon, Montgomery County's Cheltenham and Norristown, and South Jersey's Camden (a majority-Black small city in long economic difficulty) and suburbs each record Black populations that have grown across every recent census.
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. Employment runs on the region's eds-and-meds economy — the hospital and university systems are the largest employers of Black Philadelphians as of the region generally — with city government, the transit authority, and the school district the great public employers of this reference's public-sector profile. The economic data beneath the institutional strength are difficult: Black Philadelphia's poverty rate runs near a quarter of the population, and median Black household income trails the metro's other metros' Black medians in this section, a profile the housing data deepen — Philadelphia's low housing costs made it a city of Black homeowners (its Black homeownership rate runs above peer cities) in aging housing stock.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the Philadelphia 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 Philadelphia as for every entry.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Philadelphia metro, alone or in combination | 680,000 |
| Black share of the Philadelphia metro population | 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.