State Plates

Movement and Change: Black Maine

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Maine — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 45,000, alone or in combination, 2 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

Maine holds about 45,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in thirty of its people, with Black alone at about 25,000, or 1.8 percent. It is the whitest-state region's counterpart profile to Vermont's: a small, old native-born layer in the seaports, and a modern population created largely by refugee resettlement in Portland and Lewiston, two of the smallest cities in America to be demographically transformed by African migration.

Black Maine's early record runs through the seaports: Portland's and Bangor's Black congregations and maritime workers from the early republic; the Underground Railroad's coastal routes to Canada; and the community of Malaga Island, off Phippsburg, where a mixed-race fishing community of Black, white, and Native descent lived from the nineteenth century until the state evicted its residents in 1912 and removed its schoolhouse and graves — an episode Maine has since formally acknowledged, with the island preserved as a state reserve and its story taught in the state's schools. The twentieth century's native-born Black population remained small — railroad porters, domestics, the Bates and Bowdoin colleges' small communities — numbering in the low thousands statewide as late as the century's end.

The transformation began in the 1990s and centered on two cities. Portland, the state's largest at about 68,000, became a primary resettlement site for Somali, Sudanese, Congolese, and other African refugees; its Black population now stands around a tenth of the city, its school district majority-minority in enrollment, its Munjoy Hill and East Bayside districts the community's center. Lewiston, the Androscoggin mill city of about 37,000, received a famous secondary migration of Somali families from 2001 onward — drawn by housing costs and safety — until residents of Somali and broader African origin formed roughly a sixth of the city, the largest proportional African transformation of any American small city in the resettlement record. Auburn, across the river, and Biddeford, Sanford, and Bangor (in smaller numbers) complete the map; the rest of Maine records Black shares under 1 percent in most counties.

The National Movement Around the State

In Maine, 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. Maine, in the Northeast, 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 Maine.

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

In Maine, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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 ladder is national; the attainment in the rows below is Maine's.

The migration currents read locally in Maine, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. On this plate — the plate for 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. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Maine's own record, stated plainly in the table.

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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