Metro Plates
Black Population in Selma, Alabama
Selma, the seat of Dallas County in west-central Alabama, is a city of about 17,800 people, roughly 82 percent of them Black — one of the highest Black population shares of any incorporated city in the United States. Selma sits in the heart of the Black Belt, the crescent of dark-soil counties across Alabama and Mississippi whose plantation-era agriculture bound a large enslaved population to the land and whose descendant communities remain majority Black today. Few American cities are better known: the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, and the confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, made this small city a permanent landmark of the nation's civic history. This article profiles Selma's Black population in the census record: its size, its county setting, and its economic profile.
Size and Share
The 2020 census counted about 14,600 Black residents in Selma, against a total population just under 18,000 that has been slowly declining for decades as younger residents leave for Montgomery, Birmingham, and the metropolitan South. The Black share — about 82 percent — places Selma in a small class of American cities where Black residents form not a plurality but an overwhelming majority, alongside places like East St. Louis and Prichard. Dallas County around the city tells the same story at county scale: roughly 69 percent Black, one of the highest county shares in Alabama. The Black population of Selma is also notably rooted: a large fraction of its families trace their presence in Dallas County back generations, through the sharecropping era that followed emancipation and into the present.
The Black Belt Setting
Selma's demography cannot be separated from the Black Belt itself. The region's rich prairie soil made it the center of Alabama's cotton economy in the nineteenth century, and the labor system built on that soil concentrated enslaved African Americans in counties like Dallas at densities unmatched elsewhere in the state. After emancipation, the Black majority stayed — working the same land as tenant farmers and sharecroppers, building churches, schools, and businesses in Selma's streets, and sustaining a civic infrastructure that would later carry a movement. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 grew directly out of that infrastructure: the teachers, students, and church congregations of a majority-Black city organizing in their own community. The Edmund Pettus Bridge, a steel through-arch structure over the Alabama River on U.S. Route 80, remains the movement's most recognized physical landmark, and Selma's Black heritage draws visitors from around the world to a city of fewer than 20,000 people.
Income, Education, and the Present Economy
The economic figures describe the other side of the Black Belt's history: a region the modern economy has largely passed by. Selma's median household income is about $30,000 — well under half the national figure — and roughly 31 percent of residents live in poverty. Educational attainment is correspondingly pressed: about 13 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher. The city's employers are anchored by its hospital, its county and municipal government, its schools, and a thin layer of manufacturing and retail along the highway corridors; the International Paper mill at River Dale and the automotive suppliers scattered across the region employ Dallas County residents but have not reversed the long population decline. Selma University, a small historically Black college founded in 1878, and the Wallace Community College Selma campus carry the city's higher-education load. What the census records, in sum, is a community of extraordinary historical weight and rootedness working with one of the thinnest economic bases of any city its size — a profile it shares with majority-Black county seats across the Black Belt. The regional context completes the picture. Dallas County is ringed by the other Black Belt counties — Wilcox, Perry, Lowndes, Marengo — whose Black shares range from half to four-fifths, and Selma is the largest city of that whole region: its hospital, its community college, its retail, and its churches serve a Black countryside of tens of thousands beyond the city line. Counted that way, the community Selma anchors is far larger than its 14,600 Black residents, and its weight in Alabama's demographic geography is correspondingly greater. Few cities anywhere carry so much of a nation's memory on so small a population, and the census figures — 82 percent Black, rooted for two centuries in the same soil — are the statistical shadow of that fact.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| median household income | $30,000 |
| of residents live below the poverty line | 31% |
| of Selma's residents are Black | 82% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Selma city, Alabama 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.