State Plates
The Black Population of Indiana
About 750,000 Black Hoosiers — one in nine residents — between Indianapolis's near-third and Gary's heavy majority in the Calumet region. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
In Indiana, the distribution reads at state scale in Indiana, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Indiana holds about 750,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in nine of its people, with Black alone at about 648,000, or 9.6 percent. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Indiana's own record, stated plainly in the table.
In Indiana, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. For Indiana, fort Wayne, the state's second city, is roughly a sixth Black, with a community built on the harvester and electrical industries. For Indiana, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Indiana sits in the 6 to 11 percent band. Its Black alone share of 10 percent — 23 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 750,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Indiana two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Indiana 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 Indiana; read the two together. In Indiana's band — the 6 to 11 percent band — the shaded peers include California, Connecticut, Kansas and Kentucky. In Indiana, 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 Indiana exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Indiana, 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: 10 percent is not a sample of Black Indiana, it is Black Indiana measured against all of Indiana. In Indiana, 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.
In Indiana, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Indiana is read correctly as two profiles bound in one state file: a capital-city community of a quarter-million with a complete institutional structure, and a steel-corner population in the nation's most documented industrial contraction. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Indiana's particular numbers.
In Indiana, for Indiana, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. In Indiana, the Indianapolis profile in the cities section carries the capital's neighborhood-level account. In Indiana, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
Reading This Plate
In Indiana, 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 Indiana; 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 Indiana plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Indiana, 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 Indiana, 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 Indiana, the alone share of 10 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 750,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 10% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 11% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 750,000 |
| 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.