State Plates
The Black Population of Montana
About 13,000 Black Montana residents — one in eighty — the smallest share in the nation, with a history written by Buffalo Soldiers. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
Black Montana was created by the Army. The 25th Infantry — a Black regiment — garrisoned Fort Missoula from 1888, and from there its soldiers conducted the Army's celebrated bicycle experiments: in 1896 and 1897 the 'Bicycle Corps' rode from Missoula to Yellowstone and then to St. Louis, 1,900 miles in 41 days, testing bicycles as military transport and generating national press — the riders' photographs are among the iconic images of the Black regulars. The 24th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry rotated through Fort Assinniboine (near Havre, then among the largest posts in the West) and Fort Harrison at Helena. The veterans who stayed seeded small communities in the fort towns; Helena, the capital, held the most durable — a Black neighborhood around its rail yards and statehouse with churches dating to the 1880s — and the mining cities (Butte above all, whose cosmopolitan camps included a small Black community with its own churches and a chapter of the era's Black civic life) and the railroad towns (Great Falls, Miles City, Glendive) held the rest of the territorial-era layer.
In Montana, no Montana city holds a Black population large enough to form a census-visible community in the mainland sense. Great Falls (Malmstrom Air Force Base) and Billings (the state's largest city and medical-rail hub) hold the largest counts — each in the range of one to two thousand in combination counts — followed by Missoula and Bozeman (the university towns), Helena, and the base and college communities. The population's occupational shape follows: military families at Malmstrom, university students and staff, health-care and service workers in the regional hubs, and individual families across the ranch and reservation-border counties where a county's entire Black population may number in the dozens. Black Montanans' civic institutions are correspondingly statewide rather than neighborhood-based: a small network of churches, the Montana Black heritage projects of the state historical society, and the universities' Black student organizations function as the community's infrastructure.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Montana sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 1 percent — 48 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 13,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Montana two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Montana 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 Montana; read the two together. In Montana's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii. In Montana, 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 Montana exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Montana, 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: 1 percent is not a sample of Black Montana, it is Black Montana measured against all of Montana. In Montana, 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.
Montana closes the census section's western survey at its minimum: one in eighty residents, 13,000 people, no Black county above 4 percent, and two of the finest stories in the western file. The reference includes it at full length because completeness is the point of an atlas — every state's Black population, at whatever scale, is part of the national count of 52.8 million that the overview article reports.
Reading This Plate
In Montana, 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 Montana; 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 Montana plate in this atlas stands on.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 1.2% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 13,000 |
| 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.