State Plates
The Black Population of Maryland
About 2 million Black Marylanders — nearly one in three residents, the highest share outside the Deep South — from Baltimore to Prince George's County. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
The distribution reads at state scale in Maryland, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Maryland holds about 2 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in three of its people, with Black alone at about 1.82 million, or 29.5 percent. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Maryland's table states plainly.
The distribution reads at state scale in Maryland, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Prince George's County, adjoining Washington on its east, holds roughly 580,000 Black residents — about 64 percent of its 967,000 people — the largest majority-Black county population in the nation. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Maryland; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Maryland sits in the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over. Its Black alone share of 31 percent — 5 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 2 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Maryland two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Maryland 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 Maryland; read the two together. In Maryland's band — the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over — the shaded peers include Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and District of Columbia. In Maryland, 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 Maryland exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Maryland, 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: 31 percent is not a sample of Black Maryland, it is Black Maryland measured against all of Maryland. In Maryland, 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 Maryland, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Baltimore, profiled in the cities section, holds the state's second concentration: a city roughly three-fifths Black, some 350,000 people, with the state's most difficult urban indicators standing in permanent contrast to Prince George's, ninety minutes apart. Between and around them: Montgomery County, the wealthy Washington suburb, holds a Black population of about 210,000 — roughly a fifth of the county, in communities from Silver Spring's diverse corridors to the upcounty — and Howard County's Columbia, the planned city, is roughly a fifth Black with among the strongest school and income data in the state. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Maryland's households stand.
In Maryland, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. In Maryland, maryland is the state that proves the reference's central geographic argument from the positive side: put a Black population beside a stable, high-wage, credential-rewarding employment engine and its statistics transform within two generations. Maryland's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.
Reading This Plate
In Maryland, 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 Maryland; 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 Maryland plate in this atlas stands on.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 31% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 32% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 2 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.