State Plates

Movement and Change: Black Georgia

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Georgia — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 3.6 million, alone or in combination, 33 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

For Georgia, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. The decennial census counted about 3.6 million Black Georgians — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in three residents of the state, with Black alone at about 3.3 million, or 31 percent. The plate sets the national ladder beside Georgia's attainment and invites the two-sided reading.

The migration currents read locally in Georgia, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Georgia was the last of the original colonies to legalize slavery and then built one of the largest enslaved populations in the South; by the Civil War, nearly half of Georgians were enslaved. The point of the benchmark is position: where Georgia stands, stated before anything is made of it.

In Georgia, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. For Georgia, no state has gained more from the New Great Migration than Georgia. Held against the national midpoint, Georgia's own rows say how its households stand.

The National Movement Around the State

In Georgia, 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. Georgia, in the South, 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 Georgia.

In Georgia, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Georgia, 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 Georgia. In Georgia, 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 Georgia, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.

In Georgia, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Georgia's Black geography has two layers. The table is where the general pattern becomes Georgia's own figures.

For Georgia, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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. On this plate — the plate for Georgia — the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national coverage pattern on one side, the state's system on the other.

The subject here is Movement and Change: Black Georgia, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: 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. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for Georgia.

For Georgia, the record behind this plate of Georgia is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. In Georgia, where the table carries a national benchmark row, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on, so the comparison it invites is an honest one — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.

Two further figures complete the plate's account of Georgia: 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. For Georgia, stated together with the measures above, they fix the population this plate describes — its size, its share, and its standing against the national record — and they are the figures the surrounding text interprets, neither rounded further nor carried beyond what the source publishes.

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.

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