National Plates
Black Population Share by State: The Share Plate
The share plate answers the question of presence: in which states does the Black population form the largest part of the whole? Read across the fifty states and the District of Columbia, the ranking is steep and regional. The District of Columbia stands first at about 45 percent Black. Mississippi leads the states at about 38 percent, followed by Louisiana and Georgia at about a third each, Maryland just below a third, then South Carolina and Alabama in the high twenties and North Carolina and Delaware in the low twenties. From there the ranking descends through a middle band of large states — Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, New York, Illinois, Texas — before reaching the mountain West and northern New England, where shares of one or two percent are typical.
The top of the ranking
The top of the share ranking is entirely southern, and it is worth reading slowly. Mississippi's roughly 38 percent is the product of a population that is at once comparatively small in total — under three million people — and deeply rooted, county by county, across the Delta and the state's southwest. Louisiana's third is anchored by New Orleans and the river parishes as well as its northern parishes. Georgia's third pairs the Atlanta metropolis with the deep-share counties of the southwest and the coastal plain. Maryland's share, by contrast, is a metropolitan share: Baltimore and the Washington suburbs carry it. The District of Columbia, a city rather than a state, has held the highest Black share of any jurisdiction in the country throughout the modern census era, though its share has declined from the majorities recorded in the late twentieth century as the city's total population grew.
The middle and the tail
The middle of the ranking — shares between roughly ten and twenty percent — is where most Black Americans actually live, because it contains the largest states. New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and Ohio each hold Black populations in the millions at shares between about thirteen and seventeen percent. The tail of the ranking is equally instructive: the states of the interior West and the far North — Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, Vermont, the Dakotas — record shares at or near one percent, and their Black populations, while small, include some of the faster-growing in percentage terms, a pattern the movement plates take up. A share ranking flattens all of this into one column; the State Plates section restores the depth, giving each state its own set of six plates with counts, shares, and the income, education, health, and business measures that presence alone cannot describe.
How to read a share plate
Three cautions govern every share map in this atlas. First, share is a ratio: it rises when the Black population grows and also when the total population grows more slowly, so a rising share is not by itself a growth story — the companion count plates carry that half. Second, state shares average away the county pattern; nearly every state contains counties far above and far below its mean, which is why the atlas descends to the county in the Black Belt & Regions section. Third, the figures here are the Black-alone population of the 2020 Census and the American Community Survey; counting everyone who identified as Black in combination with another race raises every share, most noticeably in states with large multiracial populations. The methodology note on each plate states which count the plate draws, so that plates are never compared across definitions by accident.
Share as the atlas's first language
Share is the first language this atlas speaks, because it is the language of the choropleth itself: a map can shade only a rate, never a count, without lying about the sizes of the places it draws. But the share plate is deliberately paired, everywhere in the State Plates section, with its count table, so that presence and weight are never confused. A state like Mississippi, first in share among the states and modest in count, and a state like California, near the bottom in share and near the top in count, are both fully Black geographies, of opposite kinds. The remaining plates of each state's set then complicate the single number properly: the income plate asks what share cannot say about earnings, the education plate about attainment, the health plate about outcomes, the business plate about ownership, and the movement plate about direction. Read in sequence, a state's six plates turn the single shaded tile of this national map into a portrait. That is the work the share plate commissions, and the standard — every figure sourced, every definition stated — is the standard the whole atlas keeps.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Highest share, jurisdiction | District of Columbia, about 45 percent |
| Highest share, state | Mississippi, about 38 percent |
| States at 30 percent or more | Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Maryland |
| States in the 20-29 percent band | South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, Delaware |
| States in the 12-19 percent band | Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, New York, Illinois, Arkansas, Ohio, Texas, New Jersey |
| Lowest shares | Montana, Idaho, Utah, Vermont, Wyoming — about 1 percent each |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic and Housing Characteristics File; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey. 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.