Gazetteer & Your Place
Your Place: Black St. Louis
St. Louis holds about 140,000 Black residents in the city and more than half a million across the bi-state metro. The census profile.
The Place in the Atlas
St. 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. Louis on the Illinois shore. St. Louis was the great river gateway of Black migration: the steamboat and rail crossroads where the South's Black population funneled north and west. Its modern data record a city that has lost more than half its peak population, a Black community suburbanizing across the county line, and a north-south divide that is the region's organizing fact.
The historic center is the Ville, in the city's northwest: a neighborhood built under segregation's constraints into a complete Black institutional world. 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. Around it, Mill Creek Valley — a Black district of some twenty thousand residents adjoining downtown — was demolished in the urban renewal of the late 1950s, its population dispersed across the north side; the clearance remains the city's defining act of displacement in the historical record.
Plates for This Place
The St. Louis file in this atlas holds three metro plates — distribution, concentration, and movement — built on the figures this page carries: about 140,000 Black residents, 46% of the metro. Around them stand the state plates for the state St. Louis anchors, whose Black alone share is 11%, and the national plates that frame both. Your Place is the front door to that file: begin with St. Louis, and every plate named above is one shelf away.
A gazetteer is the oldest part of any atlas — the index of places, with the facts that fix St. Louis in the whole. The facts that fix St. Louis are its size within Black America, its share of its own ground, and its position in the national pattern of concentration: a metro whose Black community is large enough, and established enough, to appear in every national table the federal record publishes. Those are the coordinates. The plates give them depth.
Modern Black St. Louis is the north side: the vast grid from the riverfront wards through Fairground, Penrose, Walnut Park, and Baden, majority Black across most of its extent, holding the city's largest Black population and its most difficult indicators — the tracts with the region's lowest incomes and highest vacancy. Delmar Boulevard, running east-west through the city's middle, is the famous shorthand for the divide: the neighborhoods north of it are overwhelmingly Black and disinvested; those south of it, whiter and wealthier, in a pattern so consistent that the street's name functions in the literature as a measurement. South St. Louis holds smaller Black communities in its mixed districts, and the city's overall Black share — more than two in five — blends a north side that is a Black city unto itself with a south side where Black residents are a modest minority.
The metropolitan story is suburbanization at scale. St. Louis County's northern municipalities — Ferguson, Florissant, Hazelwood, Spanish Lake, Jennings, Berkeley, and University City at the city's edge — received the city's Black outflow across the late twentieth century, transforming from nearly all-White suburbs to substantially or majority Black communities within a generation, at every income level from working-class apartment corridors to stable homeowner districts. The county's Black population now exceeds the city's. West County and South County record smaller shares. Across the river, East St. Louis — more than nine-tenths Black, profiled in the Illinois account — and the Metro East suburbs complete a bi-state Black population above half a million, the largest in the interior between Chicago and Texas.
The Your Place pages are written to be landed on, not just read through: a resident of the St. Louis metro arriving here finds the community counted, placed, and connected to its state and national frames in a single page. Holding the structure still while the numbers move is the gazetteer's work — the only way an atlas stays honest across editions, for St. Louis as for every entry.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the St. Louis metro, alone or in combination | 140,000 |
| Black share of the St. Louis metro population | 46% |
| 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.