Metro Plates
Black St. Louis: The Ville, the North Side, and the County
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black St. Louis: the population itself — its size, its share of the metro, and its distribution across the city and suburbs that make up the metropolitan whole.
The distribution reads at state scale in St. Louis, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Louis holds about 140,000 Black residents within its independent city — Black alone or in combination, more than two in five of its 302,000 people — and more than half a million across the bi-state metropolitan area, including East St. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank St. Louis; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The Ville and the Making of Black St. Louis
For St. Louis, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Sumner High School, opened in 1875 as the first high school for Black students west of the Mississippi, educated generations of the region's Black professional class; Homer G. Phillips Hospital, opened in 1937, was for decades the largest Black hospital in America and trained hundreds of Black physicians and nurses; Stowe Teachers College, Antioch Baptist, and the district's businesses completed the enclave. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, St. Louis's attainment on the other.
The North Side and the Delmar Divide
For Black St. Louis: The Ville, the North Side, and the County, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. Its table records Black residents of the City of St. Louis, approximately: 140,000; Black residents of the bi-state St. Louis metropolitan area: 500,000+. In St. Louis, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
The County: North County's Transformation
In St. Louis, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The metropolitan story is suburbanization at scale. Held against the national midpoint, St. Louis's own rows say how its households stand.
Economy and Institutions
The employment base runs on health care (BJC HealthCare, anchored at the Central West End medical center, is the region's largest employer), the universities — Washington University, Saint Louis University, and Harris-Stowe State University, the city's public HBCU — and the public sector. The data beneath the institutions are hard: Black St. Louis's poverty rates, in both city and inner county, rank at the difficult end of this section's metros, and the health data for the north side's districts — life expectancy differences of well over a decade across the Delmar line in the published tract analyses — are among the starkest intra-urban gaps in the national literature.
Reading the St. Louis Numbers
St. Louis is the profile where the metropolitan frame matters most: a city of 140,000 Black residents inside a Black metropolis of more than half a million, in a political geography — an independent city severed from its county since the nineteenth century — that splits the population's data across jurisdictions. Read the region whole, as its people live it, and use the city figure only with its boundary in mind.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the City of St. Louis, approximately: 140,000; Black residents of the bi-state St. Louis metropolitan area: 500,000+. For St. Louis, each figure is published by the source named below and rounded as published; the plate's map shades the Black share of the population on the same basis, so the table and the map can be read against each other without conversion.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — Black St. Louis: The Ville, the North Side, and the County — because the published record supports one. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. The plate states St. Louis's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of St. Louis: Black residents of the City of St. Louis, approximately: 140,000; Black residents of the bi-state St. Louis metropolitan area: 500,000+. In St. Louis, stated together with the measures above, they fix the population this plate describes — its size, its share, and its standing against the national record — and they are the figures the surrounding text interprets, neither rounded further nor carried beyond what the source publishes.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for St. Louis are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In St. Louis, 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.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the City of St. Louis, approximately | 140,000 |
| Black residents of the bi-state St. Louis metropolitan area | 500,000+ |
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.