State Plates
Movement and Change: Black Illinois
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Illinois — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 2 million, alone or in combination, 14 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
In Illinois, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Illinois's southern counties complicate its Northern image. For Illinois, held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
In Illinois, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. For Illinois, the estimates record an Illinois Black population that is stable in count and slowly declining in share: Chicago's dynamics dominate — the city's Black population decline and suburban growth chronicled in its profile — while downstate's small cities lose population with their regions. Illinois's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.
The National Movement Around the State
In Illinois, 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. Illinois, in the Midwest, 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 Illinois.
In Illinois, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Illinois, 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 Illinois. In Illinois, 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 Illinois, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
The migration currents read locally in Illinois, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Illinois holds about 2 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in six of its people, with Black alone at about 1.8 million, or 14 percent. The general record's only office on this plate is to sharpen Illinois's, which the table states plainly.
For Illinois, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Springfield, the state capital, is about a fifth Black, with a community reaching back to the free Black settlements of the 1820s. Below, the table's rows belong to Illinois, and there the general becomes particular.
Reading This Plate
In Illinois, 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 Illinois; 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 Illinois plate in this atlas stands on.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Movement and Change: Black Illinois. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 14%; Black share, alone or in combination: 15.6%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 2 Million. In Illinois, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
This plate takes up its subject directly: Movement and Change: Black Illinois. How this plate is read, for Illinois: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black share of the state population (alone): 14%; Black share, alone or in combination: 15.6%. In Illinois, the atlas asks no more of the material than the material can state.
How this plate is read, for Illinois: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black share of the state population (alone): 14%; Black share, alone or in combination: 15.6%. For Illinois, the two presentations are one record in two forms, and a reader who checks one against the other has the plate's whole method in hand. In Illinois, this note is written for the movement plate; the companion plates of the same place carry notes of their own.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 14% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 15.6% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 2 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.