State Plates
The Black Population of Minnesota
About 495,000 Black Minnesotans — one in twelve residents — holding both the nation's largest Somali community and some of its widest outcome gaps. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
The distribution reads at state scale in Minnesota, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Minnesota holds about 495,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twelve of its people, with Black alone at about 399,000, or 7 percent. Minnesota's Black population is a study in juxtaposition: an old, small native-born community centered in the Twin Cities; the largest Somali community in the United States, built by refugee resettlement since the 1990s; and outcome indicators that rank, in study after study, among the widest Black-white gaps in the nation despite the state's overall prosperity rankings. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Minnesota's table states plainly.
The distribution reads at state scale in Minnesota, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. A state that ranks at or near the top in overall income, education, and health records Black outcomes that rank near the bottom in several national comparisons: Black homeownership in the Twin Cities in the mid-twenties percent range — among the lowest of any metro in this reference — against a state White rate in the high seventies; Black median household income at roughly half the state's overall figure; educational proficiency gaps in the state assessment data among the nation's widest. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Minnesota stands so the plate can be read.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Minnesota sits in the 6 to 11 percent band. Its Black alone share of 7 percent — 28 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 495,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Minnesota two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Minnesota 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 Minnesota; read the two together. In Minnesota's band — the 6 to 11 percent band — the shaded peers include California, Connecticut, Indiana and Kansas. In Minnesota, 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 Minnesota exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Minnesota, 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: 7 percent is not a sample of Black Minnesota, it is Black Minnesota measured against all of Minnesota. In Minnesota, 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 Minnesota, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The 495,000 in these tables are the population all three sentences describe. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Minnesota's particular numbers.
Reading This Plate
In Minnesota, 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 Minnesota; 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 Minnesota plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Minnesota, 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 Minnesota, 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 Minnesota, the alone share of 7 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 495,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 7% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 8.7% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 495,000 |
| 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.