Metro Plates
Black Phoenix: Growth and Movement
In Phoenix, 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 Phoenix, a metro of about 125,000 Black residents, against the currents that have reshaped Black geography in the present era.
Growth and Movement
The migration currents read locally in Phoenix, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Phoenix holds about 125,000 Black residents within the city — Black alone or in combination, roughly 8 percent of its 1.6 million people — and about 250,000 across the metropolitan Valley. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Phoenix; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The migration currents read locally in Phoenix, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Here, on the plate for Phoenix, the Valley's growth machine distributed the new Black population everywhere the subdivisions went. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Phoenix stands so the plate can be read.
For Phoenix, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. The institutional layer is the profile's work in progress. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Phoenix's attainment on the other.
The Currents Around the Metro
In Phoenix, 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 Phoenix metro's record, in the published counts, is its own negotiation among those currents. In Phoenix, 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 Phoenix, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. For Phoenix, historic Black Phoenix was small and confined: a community of a few thousand in the early twentieth century, centered south of the railroad tracks in the warehouse district's edge and in the Eastlake Park neighborhood — the park itself a center of Black civic life — served by the Carver schools (the segregated George Washington Carver High School, now a museum) and a cluster of churches. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Phoenix's households on the other.
Movement into and out of the Phoenix 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 Phoenix, read together with the concentration plate, the movement record explains how the share above came to be, and where it is tending.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — Black Phoenix: Growth and Movement — because the published record supports one. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Phoenix metro, alone or in combination: 125,000; Black share of the Phoenix metro population, alone or in combination: 8%; Black share of the state population, alone: 5%. In Phoenix, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
For Black Phoenix: Growth and Movement, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. In Phoenix, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
The subject here is Black Phoenix: Growth and Movement, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. Two further figures complete the plate's account of Phoenix: Black share of the state population, alone: 5%; Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates): 13.5%. For Phoenix, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
This plate takes up its subject directly: Black Phoenix: Growth and Movement. Its table records Black residents of the Phoenix metro, alone or in combination: 125,000; Black share of the Phoenix metro population, alone or in combination: 8%. Here, on the plate for Phoenix, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Phoenix metro, alone or in combination | 125,000 |
| Black share of the Phoenix metro population, alone or in combination | 8% |
| Black share of the state population, alone | 5% |
| 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.