State Plates
The Black Population of New Hampshire
About 35,000 Black New Hampshire residents — one in forty — between a colonial port community and a resettled mill city. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
New Hampshire holds about 35,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in forty of its people, with Black alone at about 21,000, or 1.5 percent. The population is a study in two eras: a colonial Black community in Portsmouth, the state's only seaport, whose burial ground lay forgotten under a downtown street for two centuries; and a modern community in Manchester, the old mill city, built substantially by refugee resettlement. Between them sits one of the smallest Black populations in the reference, spread thin across a largely rural state.
The state's remaining Black population distributes along the Massachusetts border's suburban corridor — Nashua (roughly 4 to 5 percent Black), Salem, and the I-93 towns, whose communities are Boston-metro spillover in the census's functional terms — and around the institutions: the University of New Hampshire at Durham, Dartmouth at Hanover, the naval shipyard at Portsmouth (whose workforce lives on both sides of the Maine line), and Pease's air base legacy. The North Country and the lakes and mountain regions record Black shares under 1 percent, in the pattern of northern New England generally. The state's Black elected and institutional presence is correspondingly metro-concentrated: the Manchester and seacoast delegations carry it in the legislature's data.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, New Hampshire sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 2 percent — 43 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 35,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads New Hampshire two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire; read the two together. In New Hampshire's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii. In New Hampshire, 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 New Hampshire exactly as the source agency releases them.
In New Hampshire, 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: 2 percent is not a sample of Black New Hampshire, it is Black New Hampshire measured against all of New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, 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.
The cultural record adds one more thread: Langston Hughes spent formative summers in New Hampshire's orbit, and the state's Black literary and arts presence — carried in the modern era by the seacoast's heritage organizations and Manchester's festival culture — is documented in the heritage trail's extensions. The state's Black population also includes a small, old seacoast layer in Dover and Exeter whose church records run to the early republic.
New Hampshire's 35,000 Black residents hold two of the reference's most instructive small facts: a burial ground that slept under a street for two hundred years and now anchors a city's conscience, and a mill city remade by the world's displaced within one generation. Small states, in this data as in others, are not minor subjects — they are concentrated ones.
Reading This Plate
In New Hampshire, 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 New Hampshire; 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 New Hampshire plate in this atlas stands on.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 2% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 2.5% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 35,000 |
| 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.