State Plates
The Black Population of Connecticut
About 460,000 Black Connecticut residents — one in eight — in the state of America's sharpest rich-poor adjacency. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
In Connecticut, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Connecticut holds about 460,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in eight of its people, with Black alone at about 361,000, or 10 percent. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Connecticut's households stand.
In Connecticut, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Connecticut's numbers must be read with its municipal structure in mind: 169 small towns, each its own school district and tax base, in a state with no county government. Connecticut's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Connecticut sits in the 6 to 11 percent band. Its Black alone share of 11 percent — 20 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 460,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Connecticut two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Connecticut 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 Connecticut; read the two together. In Connecticut's band — the 6 to 11 percent band — the shaded peers include California, Indiana, Kansas and Kentucky. In Connecticut, 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 Connecticut exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Connecticut, 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: 11 percent is not a sample of Black Connecticut, it is Black Connecticut measured against all of Connecticut. In Connecticut, 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.
In Connecticut, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. In Connecticut, connecticut is the adjacency profile: the richest state's Black population, distributed between three strained cities and the suburbs ringing them, with outcomes that depend almost entirely on which side of a town line an address falls. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Connecticut's particular numbers.
Reading This Plate
In Connecticut, 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 Connecticut; 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 Connecticut plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Connecticut, the Black alone count holds residents who marked Black and no other race; the alone-or-in-combination count adds residents who marked Black alongside another race. In Connecticut, the second is the larger and the more inclusive, and the gap between them is itself a fact about the place — widest where multiracial identification is most common, narrowest where it is rare. For Connecticut, the alone share of 11 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 460,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as The Black Population of Connecticut. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 11%; Black share, alone or in combination: 12.7%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 460,000. The plate states Connecticut's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 11% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 12.7% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 460,000 |
| 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.