Metro Plates
Black Population in Sumter, South Carolina
Sumter is a city of about 43,500 people, the seat of Sumter County in the Midlands of South Carolina — and about 48 percent of its residents are Black, a near-majority within the city limits and a clear majority when the surrounding county is counted. Sumter sits in the state's central Black belt of counties, where the plantation economy of the inner coastal plain left large Black populations across the countryside, and it serves as that region's principal city — its hospital, retail, and institutional center — alongside Shaw Air Force Base, one of the Air Force's oldest installations, just outside the city. This article profiles Sumter's Black population in the census data: its size, its county setting, and its economic standing.
Size and Share
The 2020 census counted roughly 20,900 Black residents in Sumter, about 48 percent of the city. Sumter County as a whole is about 48 to 50 percent Black within a wider Midlands region — Clarendon, Lee, Williamsburg, and Sumter counties together — that ranks among the most heavily Black rural regions of the Atlantic South. The city's population has grown modestly over recent decades, buoyed by the military presence and its regional-center functions, which distinguishes Sumter from many Black-belt seats in this reference whose populations are falling. Its Black population spans both the old urban neighborhoods around the city's historic core and the growing subdivisions fed by the base and the hospital — an Air Force city's churn layered over one of South Carolina's oldest rooted Black communities.
Morris College and the Midlands' Black Institutions
Sumter's Black institutional life is anchored by Morris College, the historically Black college founded in 1908 by the Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention of South Carolina — a church-founded institution that has educated Black teachers, ministers, and professionals for the whole Midlands region for more than a century. Around it stands the infrastructure of a Black county seat: historic congregations, the campuses of the Sumter school district, and a Black business and professional community serving the multi-county region. The wider area's Black history is deep — Sumter County's plantations worked the rich soils of the inner plain, the High Hills of Santee sheltered one of the state's oldest planting communities, and the Black majority of the surrounding counties descends from that world. General Thomas Sumter's city thus sits, demographically, at the center of a Black countryside — the urban face of a region where Black South Carolinians have always been close to half or more of the people.
Income, the Base, and the Regional Economy
Sumter's median household income is about $45,000, roughly 20 percent of residents live in poverty, and about 19 percent of adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher — figures in the upper band of the Black-belt county seats in this reference, reflecting the stabilizing weight of Shaw Air Force Base, the Prisma Health Tuomey hospital, and the city's role as a regional employer. Manufacturing — tires, electrical equipment, and food processing among the Sumter area's plants — adds an industrial layer unusual for the region, and Morris College and the University of South Carolina Sumter carry its higher education. For its Black population, the census profile is of a near-majority community in a majority-Black region, with an economy steadier than most of its peers: a city where the Black population is at once a farm-region inheritance, a college community, and a military town's civilian core. The county data sharpen the picture further. In the Clarendon and Lee county countryside east and north of the city, Black shares run well above half, and Sumter's stores, hospital, and college draw from that whole population — so the community the city serves day to day is more heavily Black than its own 48 percent suggests. Morris College's enrollment, the congregations of the city's historic Black churches, and the leadership of its school district all reflect that regional weight. In the Midlands' demographic geography, Sumter is the urban center of one of South Carolina's oldest Black regions, and its numbers carry the region with them. That dual character — rooted countryside community and modern military city — is written into every table of the city's census profile, from its age structure to its household incomes.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Population in Sumter, South Carolina are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Sumter, 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 |
|---|---|
| median household income | $45,000 |
| of residents live below the poverty line | 20% |
| of Sumter's residents are Black | 48% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Sumter city, South Carolina 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.