State Plates

Movement and Change: Black Minnesota

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Minnesota — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 495,000, alone or in combination, 7 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

The migration currents read locally in Minnesota, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Minneapolis itself is about a fifth Black — some 85,000 people — its community centered historically in the Near North (the North Side) and the south side's Phillips and Powderhorn districts, now spread across the north and northeast and into the first-ring suburbs. Paul is roughly a sixth to a fifth Black, its community centered on the Rondo neighborhood's successor districts — Rondo, the city's historic Black center, was largely demolished for the interstate in the 1960s, the displacement the historical record documents in detail — and the East Side. In Minnesota, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.

In Minnesota, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Somali refugees began arriving in the early 1990s, and secondary migration concentrated the community in the Twin Cities until Minnesota held the largest Somali population in the nation — estimated in the tens of thousands, with the community's own counts running higher — centered in Minneapolis's Cedar-Riverside (the high-rise district known nationally by its skyline silhouette), spreading through the south metro and to St. Minnesota's rows, read against the national ladder, state where its attainment stands.

The migration currents read locally in Minnesota, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. Cloud's Somali population is among the largest per capita in the nation; the meatpacking corridors of Worthington, Willmar, and Austin record Black and African populations built by plant labor recruitment since the 1990s. Locating Minnesota is the benchmark's purpose; ranking it is not.

The National Movement Around the State

In Minnesota, 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. Minnesota, in the Midwest, 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 Minnesota.

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

In Minnesota, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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 table is where the general pattern becomes Minnesota's own figures.

For Minnesota, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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 comparison is two-sided by design: a national midpoint against Minnesota's households.

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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