State Plates
The Black Population of Delaware
About 245,000 Black Delawareans — nearly a quarter of the state — anchored by Wilmington and one of the East's oldest HBCUs. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
In Delaware, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Delaware holds about 245,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly a quarter of the First State's people, with Black alone at about 218,000, or 22 percent. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Delaware's particular numbers.
For Delaware, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. For Delaware, delaware's Black community is among the oldest in the mid-Atlantic in continuous record: a border state that held slavery to the eve of emancipation while sheltering one of the East's most active Underground Railroad corridors — Wilmington's stations and the harbor pilots' networks are the documented core of the state's freedom history — and free Black communities in its towns that predate the republic. In Delaware, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Delaware sits in the 20 to 29 percent band. Its Black alone share of 22 percent — 8 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 245,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Delaware two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Delaware 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 Delaware; read the two together. In Delaware's band — the 20 to 29 percent band — the shaded peers include Alabama, North Carolina and South Carolina. In Delaware, 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 Delaware exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Delaware, 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: 22 percent is not a sample of Black Delaware, it is Black Delaware measured against all of Delaware. In Delaware, 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.
For Delaware, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Its Black population's weight in its state's life — political, institutional, cultural — exceeds what 245,000 people usually carry, because the state around them is small enough for them to constitute it. It is in the rows below — Delaware's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
Reading This Plate
In Delaware, 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 Delaware; 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 Delaware plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Delaware, 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 Delaware, 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 Delaware, the alone share of 22 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 245,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Delaware are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Delaware, 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 |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 22% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 24% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 245,000 |
| 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.