State Plates
The Black Population of Louisiana
About 1.55 million Black Louisianans — nearly one in three residents — from New Orleans' Creole parishes to the northern cotton country. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
For Louisiana, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Louisiana holds about 1.55 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in three of its people, with Black alone at about 1.46 million, or 31 percent. It is in the rows below — Louisiana's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
For Louisiana, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The state's Black geography divides into three regions. The general material becomes a specific place in the table below, in Louisiana's rows.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Louisiana sits in the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over. Its Black alone share of 33 percent — 4 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 1.55 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Louisiana two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Louisiana 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 Louisiana; read the two together. In Louisiana's band — the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over — the shaded peers include Georgia, Maryland, Mississippi and District of Columbia. In Louisiana, 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 Louisiana exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Louisiana, 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: 33 percent is not a sample of Black Louisiana, it is Black Louisiana measured against all of Louisiana. In Louisiana, 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 Louisiana, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Baton Rouge, the capital, is a majority-Black city — roughly 55 percent within its limits — and home to Southern University, the nation's largest historically Black university system flagship by the system's accounting, and to a state-government and petrochemical workforce. The table is where the general pattern becomes Louisiana's own figures.
The distribution reads at state scale in Louisiana, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. The ancestry data record Louisiana's uniqueness. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Louisiana's table states plainly.
Filed in this series as The Black Population of Louisiana, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. 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: 33.2%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.55 Million. In Louisiana, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
This plate takes up its subject directly: The Black Population of Louisiana. How this plate is read, for Louisiana: 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): 33%; Black share, alone or in combination: 33.2%. For Louisiana, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
In Louisiana, the record behind this plate of Louisiana is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. The table's benchmark row for Louisiana states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 33% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 33.2% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.55 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.