State Plates
Movement and Change: Black Kansas
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Kansas — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 235,000, alone or in combination, 6 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
Kansas holds about 235,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twelve of its people, with Black alone at about 168,000, or 5.7 percent. Kansas occupies a singular place in Black America's founding geography: the territory whose own status ignited the national crisis over slavery, and the destination of the Exodusters, the first great organized Black migration of the post-emancipation era. The modern population centers on Wichita, Kansas City (Kansas), and Topeka, over a rural layer with roots in 1879.
In 1879, thousands of Black families left Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas for Kansas in a movement organized around the promise of homestead land and self-governing towns — the Exodusters, named for the biblical exodus. Nicodemus, founded in 1877 in the northwestern plains, is the movement's surviving monument: the only Exoduster town that persists, now a National Historic Site, its population in the dozens and its significance in the national record. Dozens of Black settlements and farm colonies followed across the state, and the migration seeded Black Kansas in every region — the farm towns of the east, Topeka's Tennessee Town (named for its migrants' origin), and the railroad and packinghouse districts of the cities. The state's Black population share peaked in the territorial generation's aftermath and has run in the mid-single digits through the modern censuses — a small share with a foundational story.
Black Kansas's indicators sit at the plains pattern: incomes below the national Black figure, homeownership comparatively strong in the smaller cities, attainment anchored by the state's universities and by Washburn in Topeka, health outcomes in the state's middling-to-difficult band. The state has no HBCU. The composition remains predominantly native-born and rooted — the Exoduster-descended families of the farm counties are among the longest-continuously-resident Black populations in the West — with growing African immigrant communities in Wichita and the Kansas City suburbs. The estimates show slow growth concentrated in Wyandotte and Sedgwick counties and the Johnson County suburbs (where the Black population, though a small share, is among the fastest-growing in the state in absolute terms), against slow decline in the farm counties.
The National Movement Around the State
In Kansas, 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. Kansas, 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 Kansas.
In Kansas, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Kansas, 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 Kansas. In Kansas, 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 Kansas, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
In Kansas, the migration currents read locally in Kansas, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. Locating Kansas is the benchmark's purpose; ranking it is not.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Movement and Change: Black Kansas. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 6%; Black share, alone or in combination: 8%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 235,000. The plate reports what the sources publish for Kansas and leaves alone what they do not.
| 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.