State Plates
Movement and Change: Black Colorado
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Colorado — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 285,000, alone or in combination, 4 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
The migration currents read locally in Colorado, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. The second track is the homestead colonies: Dearfield, founded in 1910 on the eastern plains as an all-Black agricultural town, whose surviving buildings the National Park Service now preserves — its peak population in the hundreds, its data the plains counterpart to the Delta's deep base. In an atlas a benchmark answers one question — where does Colorado stand — and leaves ranking aside.
In Colorado, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. In Colorado, colorado's Black indicators sit at the favorable end of this reference's distributions on several measures: educational attainment above the national Black averages (the migration's selectivity and the university corridor together), median household income above the national Black figure, and unemployment nearer the state's overall rate than in most profiles. Held against the national midpoint, Colorado's own rows say how its households stand.
The migration currents read locally in Colorado, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Colorado is the small-share, strong-indicator western profile: 285,000 people, one in twenty, with outcomes that reflect a community built by selective migration and military settlement rather than mass labor recruitment. That is the benchmark's use: Colorado is located by it, not ranked by it.
The National Movement Around the State
In Colorado, black movement in the present era runs in several directions at once: out of the largest older metros, toward the South and its suburbs, and into mid-sized cities whose Black populations are growing fastest in percentage terms. Colorado, in the West, sits inside that wider current. The decennial counts and the survey estimates between them are the instruments that register the change; each new release revises the picture at the margin, and the direction of the lines — which places gain, which hold, which thin — is the story this plate is built to tell for Colorado.
In Colorado, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Colorado, natural increase adds births and subtracts deaths inside the state. What separates the two definitions is the multiracial population — real, growing, and small against shares of the size recorded in Colorado. In Colorado, international migration adds residents born abroad, a stream that has reshaped the Black populations of the largest gateway metros and, increasingly, of states well beyond them. For Colorado, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
In Colorado, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Read against the table, the broad pattern settles into the specific numbers that belong to Colorado.
The migration currents read locally in Colorado, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. A benchmark locates; it does not rank — and it locates Colorado on this plate.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — Movement and Change: Black Colorado — because the published record supports one. 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. In Colorado, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
| 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.