State Plates

Movement and Change: Black Louisiana

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Louisiana — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 1.55 million, alone or in combination, 33 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

In Louisiana, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. For Louisiana, the state's Black indicators record difficulty alongside depth: income and poverty figures at the hard end of the national distributions, health outcomes that anchor the difficult end of this reference's public health tables, and an age structure marked by the departure of young adults to Texas — Houston above all, a few hours west, whose Black population includes one of the largest Louisiana-born communities in the nation. Louisiana's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.

The migration currents read locally in Louisiana, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. In Louisiana, louisiana's profile completes the Deep South sequence of this section — Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia before it — and the comparison is the lesson: the five states share the plantation foundation and diverge in everything since, in growth, in institutions, and in the data's present tense. In Louisiana, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.

The National Movement Around the State

In Louisiana, 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. Louisiana, in the South, 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 Louisiana.

In Louisiana, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Louisiana, 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 Louisiana. In Louisiana, 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 Louisiana, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.

For Louisiana, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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. The specific place inside this general material is found below, in Louisiana's tabled rows.

For Louisiana, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. The state's Black geography divides into three regions. It is the table below that localizes the general material: its rows are Louisiana's, and they name a specific place.

Reading This Plate

In Louisiana, 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 Louisiana; 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 Louisiana plate in this atlas stands on.

This plate takes up its subject directly: Movement and Change: Black Louisiana. 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. For Louisiana, what the sources publish, the plate reports; what they do not, it leaves alone.

For Movement and Change: Black Louisiana, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 33%; Black share, alone or in combination: 33.2%. In Louisiana, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.

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.

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