State Plates

Movement and Change: Black Mississippi

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Mississippi — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at its counted population, alone or in combination, 38 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

In Mississippi, for Mississippi, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Mississippi was the single greatest sending state of the Great Migration relative to its size: Chicago's Black population was built substantially by Mississippians, whose northward movement between the 1910s and the 1970s removed what demographers estimate as a majority of the state's young Black adults across two generations. In Mississippi, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national currents on one side, the state's arrivals and departures on the other.

The National Movement Around the State

In Mississippi, 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. Mississippi, in the South, 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 Mississippi.

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

The migration currents read locally in Mississippi, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. The general record is background; the local one — Mississippi's, in the table — is the subject.

For Mississippi, for Mississippi, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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. Here, on the plate for Mississippi, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.

Reading This Plate

In Mississippi, 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 Mississippi; 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 Mississippi plate in this atlas stands on.

A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Mississippi, 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 Mississippi, 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 Mississippi, the alone share of 38 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of its counted population carries the community's full enumerated size.

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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