State Plates
The Black Population of Colorado
About 285,000 Black Coloradans — one in twenty residents — concentrated along the Front Range from Denver to Colorado Springs. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
For Colorado, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Colorado holds about 285,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twenty of its people, with Black alone at about 231,000, or 4 percent. Colorado's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
The distribution reads at state scale in Colorado, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Colorado Springs, the corridor's southern anchor, holds the second community — some 45,000 to 55,000 Black residents in its metro — shaped by the military economy of Fort Carson and the Air Force installations at a share well above the state's. Boulder records a small, university-shaped Black population at roughly 1 to 2 percent of the city, among the smallest shares of any major college town in this reference; Fort Collins, Greeley, and Pueblo record small communities in the low single digits, Pueblo's with steel-era roots. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Colorado stands so the plate can be read.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Colorado sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 4 percent — 35 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 285,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Colorado two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Colorado is legible on both readings, and this section of the atlas holds the two side by side.
Where the general meets the particular is the table of Colorado; read the two together. In Colorado's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii and Idaho. In Colorado, banding is a cartographer's compromise: it trades precision for pattern, letting the eye take in the geography of a whole country at once. The table restores the precision the shading rounds away, carrying the published share and count for Colorado exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Colorado, every figure on this plate descends from the federal count of the whole population — the decennial census and the American Community Survey that updates it between census years. Those instruments count everyone, which is what makes a share meaningful: 4 percent is not a sample of Black Colorado, it is Black Colorado measured against all of Colorado. In Colorado, the atlas's other plates return to this population again and again, because income, schooling, health, and ownership are all attributes of the people counted here, in this place, first.
The distribution reads at state scale in Colorado, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. A Black population of one in twenty poses the institutional arithmetic this reference meets in the West's smaller profiles: the numbers support a full civic layer — churches, media, professional associations, a Black chamber — but not the parallel institutional world of the Black Belt or the big metros. Not to rank Colorado but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
Reading This Plate
In Colorado, read the table from the top: the share first, because the share is what the map shades; then the count, because the count is what the share is made of. Shares and counts answer different questions. The share says how present Black life is in the everyday population of Colorado; the count says how much of Black America lives there. Both are published figures, rounded as the source agency publishes them, and both are the ground every other Colorado plate in this atlas stands on.
For The Black Population of Colorado, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 4%; Black share, alone or in combination: 5%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 285,000. The plate states Colorado's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 4% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 5% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 285,000 |
| Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination (Census Bureau population estimates) | 52.8 million |
| 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.