Metro Plates
Black Washington: The District and the Metro
This metro plate opens the Atlasmont file on Black Washington: 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 subject here is Black Washington: The District and the Metro, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. The metropolitan area holds about 1.6 million Black residents — roughly one in four — while the District of Columbia itself, which was the first large American city to become majority Black, in the 1950s, now records a Black share of about 41 percent: still the highest of any major American city jurisdiction, but no longer a majority. In Washington, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
The District: From Majority to Plurality
In Washington, DC, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The District's Black share peaked at about 71 percent in 1970, the product of a century and a half of Black Washington — a free Black community predating the Civil War, a Reconstruction-era influx, Great Migration arrivals, and the mid-twentieth-century departure of White residents to the suburbs. From the 1990s onward, the direction reversed: the city's population grew for the first time in decades on an influx of younger, affluent, disproportionately White newcomers, while Black Washingtonians moved to the suburbs in large numbers — many priced out of neighborhoods their families had inhabited for generations. In Washington, held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
The Suburban Center: Prince George's County
In Washington, for Washington, DC, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. In Washington, the demographic counterpart of the District's decline is Prince George's County, Maryland, directly east of the city: a county of nearly a million people that is roughly two-thirds Black and records median household incomes for Black households among the highest of any large county in the nation. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Washington's households on the other.
The Federal Engine
In Washington, DC, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Howard University, founded in 1867, anchors the region's Black institutional life as the nation's most comprehensive historically Black university. Held against the national midpoint, Washington's own rows say how its households stand.
Reading the Washington Numbers
East of the River
Inside the District, the census maps a divide along the Anacostia River. Wards 7 and 8, east of the river, remain overwhelmingly Black — above 90 percent in many tracts — and record the city's lowest incomes and its most difficult health indicators, while the wards west of Rock Creek Park have become majority White and affluent. The river line is among the sharpest internal demographic boundaries of any American city, and tract-level profiles in this section document it in full.
Washington's data punish careless reading in a specific way: the city and the region tell opposite stories. Quoting the District alone yields decline — falling share, displacement, a lost majority. Quoting the metro yields continuity and growth — 1.6 million Black residents, rising suburban affluence, the strongest Black professional base of any region its size. Both are true, and the truth of the profile is in holding them together: a population that did not leave Washington so much as redistribute across it, along lines of income and housing cost that the census maps precisely. The profiles that follow — Chicago, Houston, and the rest — apply the same discipline of separating the city figure from the regional one.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black residents of the Washington metropolitan area, approximately: 1.6 Million; Prince George's County, Maryland — among the most affluent majority-Black counties in the nation: Majority-Black. For Washington, 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.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Washington, DC: Black residents of the Washington metropolitan area, approximately: 1.6 Million; Prince George's County, Maryland — among the most affluent majority-Black counties in the nation: Majority-Black. The measures above and these together fix the population of Washington as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black residents of the Washington metropolitan area, approximately | 1.6 Million |
| Prince George's County, Maryland — among the most affluent majority-Black counties in the nation | Majority-Black |
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.