State Plates
The Black Population of Georgia
About 3.6 million Black Georgians — roughly one in three residents — make Georgia one of the most Black states in the union by share and by scale. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
For Georgia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Georgia's Black geography has two layers. It is in the rows below — Georgia's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
The distribution reads at state scale in Georgia, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. By share, Georgia at roughly one in three is exceeded among states only by Mississippi and Louisiana and by the District of Columbia as a city jurisdiction; by scale, its 3.6 million rank near the very top. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Georgia stands so the plate can be read.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Georgia sits in the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over. Its Black alone share of 33 percent — 3 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 3.6 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Georgia two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Georgia 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 Georgia; read the two together. In Georgia's band — the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over — the shaded peers include Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi and District of Columbia. In Georgia, 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 Georgia exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Georgia, 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: 33 percent is not a sample of Black Georgia, it is Black Georgia measured against all of Georgia. In Georgia, 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 Georgia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. In Georgia, georgia's profile is the template case for the state series in this section: a state where the Black population is at once an old population, rooted in counties its families have inhabited for two centuries, and a new one, arriving by the tens of thousands to a metropolitan region that now defines Black America's center of gravity as much as any place in the country. The general material becomes a specific place in the table below, in Georgia's rows.
Reading This Plate
In Georgia, 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 Georgia; 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 Georgia plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Georgia, 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 Georgia, 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 Georgia, the alone share of 33 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 3.6 million carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 33% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 33.5% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 3.6 Million |
| 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.