State Plates
The Black Population of Mississippi
Mississippi is the Blackest state in the union by share — about 38 percent Black in combination — with majority-Black counties across the Delta. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
In Mississippi, for Mississippi, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The decennial census counted Black Mississippians at about 37 percent of the population Black alone, and about 38 percent Black alone or in combination — the highest share of any state, a position Mississippi has held throughout the modern census era. In absolute terms the population is about 1.1 million, modest beside the giants of this series; it is the share, and what the share has meant across Mississippi's history, that makes the profile central to this reference. It is in the rows below — Mississippi's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
In Mississippi, in Mississippi, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The Mississippi Delta — the flat alluvial plain in the state's northwest, among the richest farmland on earth — records the country's most extensive majority-Black rural geography: county after county above 60, 70, and in Holmes County's case around 80 percent Black. The county map of Black Mississippi is, with unusual literalness, a map of where enslaved labor was concentrated in 1860 — the demographic foundation on which everything else in the state's data rests. For Mississippi, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Mississippi sits in the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over. Its Black alone share of 38 percent — 2 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, its counted population alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Mississippi two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Mississippi 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 Mississippi; read the two together. In Mississippi's band — the highest band on the plate, at 30 percent and over — the shaded peers include Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland and District of Columbia. In Mississippi, 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 Mississippi exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Mississippi, 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: 38 percent is not a sample of Black Mississippi, it is Black Mississippi measured against all of Mississippi. In Mississippi, 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.
For Mississippi, for Mississippi, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. For Mississippi, jackson, the capital and largest city, is more than four-fifths Black — among the highest Black shares of any American city of its size — making it one of the few state capitals where Black political and civic life is the civic mainstream. In Mississippi, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
For Mississippi, in Mississippi, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. In Mississippi, mississippi's Black indicators record the most difficult conditions in this reference on most measures, and the profile must state them plainly: the lowest Black median household income of any state in most survey years, among the highest Black poverty rates, and health indicators — in the data of the public health section — that include the nation's highest rates on several measures. Held against the national midpoint, Mississippi's own rows say how its households stand.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 38% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 38% |
| 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.