State Plates
The Black Population of District of Columbia
In the District of Columbia, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. About 310,000 Black residents — roughly 41 percent of the District alone, 45 percent alone or in combination — make this the most heavily Black state-level geography in the nation, concentrated east of the Anacostia River and through the city's northeast. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into District of Columbia's particular numbers.
Distribution Across the State
The distribution reads at state scale in the District of Columbia, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Washington holds about 310,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly half of its people, with Black alone at about 282,000, or 41 percent. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which District of Columbia's table states plainly.
The distribution reads at state scale in the District of Columbia — a single city wearing a state's rank in the federal tables, sixty-eight square miles in all. Its Black geography divides along the Anacostia: the wards east of the river, and much of the northeast, hold large Black majorities, while the share thins toward the northwest. Over it all stands the historic core the community built first — Shaw and the U Street corridor, LeDroit Park, and the streets around Howard University. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens District of Columbia's own record, stated plainly in the table.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, District of Columbia sits in the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over. Its Black alone share of 41 percent — 1 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 310,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads District of Columbia two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. District of Columbia 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 District of Columbia; read the two together. In District of Columbia's band — the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over — the shaded peers include Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and Mississippi. In District of Columbia, 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 District of Columbia exactly as the source agency releases them.
In District of Columbia, 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: 45 percent is not a sample of Black District of Columbia, it is Black District of Columbia measured against all of District of Columbia. In District of Columbia, 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 the District of Columbia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Beyond the District line the same community continues into Maryland: Prince George's County, majority Black and among the most affluent majority-Black counties in the nation, holds the larger part of the metropolitan area's roughly 1.6 million Black residents, so the District's count is the dense core of a much larger whole. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, District of Columbia's attainment on the other.
For the District of Columbia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The cultural record matches the community's depth: U Street was Black Broadway in the years of Duke Ellington, a Washington native; Howard University has anchored Black scholarship since the nineteenth century; the Washington Afro-American has published since the era of the city's free Black community; and go-go, the District's own music, made Chuck Brown the godfather of a sound no other city produced. A population with that institutional weight leaves a footprint the counts alone would never predict. The general material becomes a specific place in the table below, in District of Columbia's rows.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 41% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 45% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 310,000 |
| 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.