National Plates
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65 plates.
The opening plate of the atlas: how 41 million Black Americans are spread across the fifty states, and where the map concentrates.
Sixteen states, one center of gravity: the South's majority share of the Black population, and how it is arranged state by state.
Ranked by presence, not size: the Black share of every state's population, from the District of Columbia and Mississippi down to the mountain West.
The national change plate: where the Black population grew, where it barely moved, and the metropolitan pattern underneath the state lines.
Most of Black America lives in metropolitan areas. This plate ranks the great concentrations and reads the suburban shape of the modern map.
From Virginia to Texas, the crescent of high-share counties that gives this atlas its deepest band — and its own section.
What Black households earn, mapped: the state income ladder from Maryland at the top to the deep-South floor, and the metro pattern in between.
Attainment mapped: where Black adults hold degrees at the highest rates, where the map runs thin, and the pattern by state and metro.
The health map at national scale: life expectancy and the major outcome measures, read region by region from the federal health record.
Black-owned business, mapped: employer firms and the millions of nonemployer firms, where they gather, and what they take in.
The tenure map: the Black homeownership rate, the gap beside it, and the state pattern from the deep South's high marks to the northern floor.
A younger population, drawn in full: the age structure of Black America and the households it forms, as the frame beneath every other plate.
According to United States Census Bureau population estimates, the Black population — counting everyone who identifies as Black alone or in combination with another race — stands at…
Its table records Black Americans live in rural (nonmetropolitan) counties — about four million people: 1 in 10; a crescent of majority- and high-Black-share rural counties runs from…
Its table records the South's share of Black America across the long arc: 1870s concentration, the Great Migration's floor around 1970, and the half-century return since: 90% → 47% →…
Draw the Delta on the census map — the flat alluvial crescent running from Memphis down the Mississippi's east bank through Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana — and the race table…
The nineteenth-century record places Black residents across the territories in the hundreds and low thousands per census — a population of soldiers first: the Black regulars of the 9th…
Its table records Black America's median age runs about five years below the national median in the ACS: Median Age ~34; more than two-fifths of Black Americans are under 30 — the…
Its table records Black Americans who speak a language other than English at home in the ACS language data: ~1 in 8; Spanish, Haitian Creole, French, and Amharic lead the non-English…
Its table records the Census Bureau's main projection series has the Black population rising through 2060, past 55 million in the alone-or-in-combination count: Growth Continues; the…
Its table records Black Americans counted in the first census of 1790 — about 19% of the young nation's population: 757,208; the growth multiple from 1790 to 2020 — achieved against a…
Its table records Black residents across the 423-county Appalachian region — concentrated in its southern tier, its coal counties, and its steel and river cities: ~1 Million People…
Its table records Black population at the 2020 Census, as the projections take off: 44 million; Projected Black population at mid-century, main series: High fifties of millions.
Crucians, Thomans, and Johnians maintain distinct island identities atop the shared one, and the territory's data profile, its tourism and government economy, its hurricane exposure…
Centenarians, the hundred-plus population the bureau counts in the tens of thousands nationally across races, include a Black contingent whose verified ages the gerontologists treat…
The Black median is the lowest of the groups the Census Bureau reports, and the gap between the Black median and the national median — roughly $21,000 — is the standard statistical…
Its table records a majority of Black residents of the 100 largest metros now live in suburbs, per the Brookings analysis of the census data: Majority Suburban; suburbanization is the…
The Pew Research Center's census analyses count roughly 2.4 million Black immigrants born in Africa — a population that has multiplied several-fold since 2000 and now forms a majority…
The streams of the 2020s are smaller than the Great Migration's flood and larger than the stagnant 2010s, moving an older, wealthier, more educated population than the one that moved…
Its table records the concentration in the survey map: the New York and South Florida metros hold the largest Jamaican and Haitian populations outside the Caribbean itself: Two Great…
Its table records the living side of the 1870 wall in the genealogy record: consumer DNA and heritage travel converting the write-in answer into identified nations and peoples: The DNA…
At national scale the pattern is the subject, and the table below carries the published measures behind the map.
Its table records the two streams in the county tables: workers to the job metros, retirees past them to the county seats — Black Belt counties gaining older Black migrants while their…
Its table records the master key under the state tables: gateway medians lead because of selected immigrant composition; the honest comparison splits native-born from composition…
Its table records official Black poverty rate, Census Bureau annual report: 17.1%; Black children living in poverty — more than one in four: 1 in 4.
Its table records the Black–White homeownership gap — wider than it was in 1960, when racial discrimination in housing was still legal: 28 Points; Black homeownership rate, American…
Its table records Black households in the United States, approximately: 15 Million; of Black Americans live in multigenerational households — grandparents, parents, and children under…
Its table records Black immigrants living in the United States: 5.1 Million; Black Americans is an immigrant — and about half of Black population growth this century is from…
Its table records Black Americans aged 65 and older, approximately: 6 Million; the Black median age, against about 39 for the nation — a younger population that is aging fast: Age 35.
Its table records Black Americans under age 18, approximately — about one in five Black residents: 14 Million; the Black population's median age (~35) runs about four years below the…
About one in five of the grandparents raising grandchildren in the United States is Black — against roughly one in eight of the older population — and Black children live in…
About one in four Black adults in the United States reports a disability — mobility, cognition, independent living, hearing, vision, or self-care — in the CDC's Behavioral Risk…
An estimated 1.4 million or more Black adults identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer in the Williams Institute's analyses of the federal survey data —…
For Black America, retirement is substantially a public program.
About one in five Black households in the United States is food insecure — the USDA's term for lacking consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life — a rate…
About one in eleven Black households has no vehicle available — three to four times the White household rate in the American Community Survey — in the most car-dependent…
By every measure the survey houses keep, Black Americans are the most religious population in the United States: roughly three-quarters identify as Christian, about three in…
About 2.4 million Black veterans live in the United States — roughly one in eight of the nation's veterans — the demographic residue of a service relationship that runs from…
By the standard statistical definition — households earning between two-thirds and twice the national median, adjusted for size — about half of Black America is middle class…
In 1967 the Supreme Court struck down the last state laws against interracial marriage; the demographic record since is a slow, steady revision of American family structure.
The retirement account is the middle class's main wealth machine — and its data contain this atlas's most quietly diagnostic finding: offered a 401(k), Black workers sign up at…
The digital divide's first era was about who was connected at all; its current era, in the federal data, is about the quality of the connection — and there the Black…
Behind the homeownership and rent-burden numbers stands a court system processing millions of eviction filings a year, and its records carry the housing file's sharpest…
The family-structure data of this atlas are usually read through mothers, and the father file corrects the frame: roughly 570,000 Black children are being raised by single…
One in four Black Americans — about twelve million people — lives in a household of three or more generations, or two generations with adult children past the college years, by…
The debt data invert the stereotype in the first line and confirm the structure in the second: Black households hold less debt in total than the typical American household in…
Every other finance file in this section presumes a bank account.
The finance files of this census mostly record deficits.
The census asks America two questions — Hispanic or not, then race — and about six million people live in the seam between them: Afro-Latinos, in the Pew Research Center's…
Every household in this census section buys the same two invisible goods — warmth and light — at prices the Energy Department's data show are anything but equal: the energy…
The largest wealth transfer in human history — the tens of trillions passing from the baby boom generation to its heirs in the financial press's projections — will arrive…
In 1960, roughly three in five Black adults were married and living with a spouse.
Half of Americans now hold a valid passport — the little blue book having gone, in two generations, from a rarity to a middle-class standard.
The last demographic act is a disposition, and America has changed its mind about it: the national cremation rate passed burial in the past decade and keeps climbing toward…
The marriage file's companion is the ending: Black marriages dissolve at higher rates than white ones in the federal data — roughly half of Black women's first marriages ending…