State Plates
The Black Population of Maine
About 45,000 Black Maine residents — one in thirty — built largely by refugee resettlement in two small cities. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
The composition makes Maine's Black population the most immigrant-origin in this reference outside the gateway metros: a majority of Black Mainers are African-born or the children of African-born parents in the survey estimates, with the Somali community the largest single group. The demographic consequences run through the tables — the youngest age structure of any Black state population in the Northeast, household sizes above state norms, school enrollments where Black students form the largest minority in both resettlement cities, and an entrepreneurial layer (the halal markets, remittance and import businesses, and restaurants of Portland's and Lewiston's main streets) visible in the business counts of two downtowns that had been declining for decades. The native-born layer persists within the same data, institutionally centered in the colleges and the Portland churches.
In Maine, the institutions have followed the people: Portland's and Lewiston's African community organizations, mosques serving the Somali communities (among the first established in northern New England), the African grocery and services economies of Lisbon Street and Congress Street, and the state university system's growing African student presence form a civic layer that did not exist a generation ago — the fastest institutional build-out, relative to population, of any profile in this section.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Maine sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 2 percent — 42 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 45,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Maine two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Maine 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 Maine; read the two together. In Maine's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii. In Maine, 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 Maine exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Maine, 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: 2 percent is not a sample of Black Maine, it is Black Maine measured against all of Maine. In Maine, 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.
Maine's profile is the resettlement story in its purest American form: a state whose Black history was a footnote for two centuries and whose Black present was written, in one generation, by the world's displacement meeting two small mill-and-port cities. The 45,000 in these tables are that meeting's result — and the state's demographic future in miniature.
Reading This Plate
In Maine, 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 Maine; 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 Maine plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Maine, 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 Maine, 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 Maine, the alone share of 2 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 45,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 2% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 3.3% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 45,000 |
| 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.