Metro Plates
Black Philadelphia: Growth and Movement
In Philadelphia, 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 Philadelphia, a metro of about 680,000 Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
In Philadelphia, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. For Philadelphia, held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
For Philadelphia, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. The modern city's Black geography is comprehensive. It is in the rows below — Philadelphia's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
For Philadelphia, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. In Philadelphia, 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. The general material becomes a specific place in the table below, in Philadelphia's rows.
The Currents Around the Metro
In Philadelphia, 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 Philadelphia metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. In Philadelphia, 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.
For Philadelphia, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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. For 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.
Movement into and out of the Philadelphia 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 Philadelphia, read together with the concentration plate, the movement record explains how the share above came to be, and where it is tending.
In Philadelphia, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. In Philadelphia, an atlas earns its keep in the comparisons it makes possible. In Philadelphia, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
The subject here is Black Philadelphia: 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 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%. The plate states Philadelphia's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
This plate takes up its subject directly: Black Philadelphia: Growth and Movement. Its table records Black residents of the Philadelphia metro, alone or in combination: 680,000; Black share of the Philadelphia metro population, alone or in combination: 44%. In Philadelphia, what the sources publish, the plate reports; what they do not, it leaves alone.
In Philadelphia, a closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Philadelphia are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. For 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. In Philadelphia, this note is written for the movement plate; the companion plates of the same place carry notes of their own.
| 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.