State Plates
The Black Population of Kansas
About 235,000 Black Kansans — one in twelve residents — from the Exoduster towns of 1879 to Wichita and Kansas City. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
Wichita, the state's largest city, is roughly a ninth to an eighth Black — some 45,000 to 50,000 residents — its community built by the aircraft industry's war-era and postwar labor demand (the 'Air Capital's' plants) and centered in the northeast districts around McAdams Park. Kansas City, Kansas, profiled with its metro in the cities section, holds the state's deepest community (roughly a fifth to a quarter of the city, with the Quindaro freedom-era roots) as part of the bi-state metro. Topeka, the capital, is roughly a sixth to a fifth Black — the state-government and railroad community whose school case, Brown v. Board of Education, decided from its segregated Monroe School, is the most consequential place-name in the education section's entire data history; the school is now a National Historical Park site. Lawrence (the university town) and the Fort Riley–Fort Leavenworth military corridor (Junction City records one of the state's highest Black shares on the Army posts' population) complete the map.
Kansas is the profile where a small population carries an outsized share of the national story: the territory that started the argument, the migration that prefigured the Great Migration by forty years, and the schoolhouse that ended legal segregation. The 235,000 in these tables live in the state those events made — and the census data record them, appropriately, in Topeka first.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Kansas sits in the 6 to 11 percent band. Its Black alone share of 6 percent — 31 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 235,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Kansas two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Kansas 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 Kansas; read the two together. In Kansas's band — the 6 to 11 percent band — the shaded peers include California, Connecticut, Indiana and Kentucky. In Kansas, 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 Kansas exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Kansas, 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: 6 percent is not a sample of Black Kansas, it is Black Kansas measured against all of Kansas. In Kansas, 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.
Reading This Plate
In Kansas, 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 Kansas; 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 Kansas plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Kansas, 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 Kansas, 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 Kansas, the alone share of 6 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 235,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Kansas: Black residents, alone or in combination: 235,000; Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination (Census Bureau population estimates): 52.8 million. In Kansas, 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.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 6% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 8% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 235,000 |
| 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.