State Plates

Movement and Change: Black New Hampshire

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black New Hampshire — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 35,000, alone or in combination, 2 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

Portsmouth's colonial Black community served the port's merchants and ship captains — enslaved and free — and buried its dead in the African Burying Ground on Chestnut Street, in use through the eighteenth century and then paved over as the city grew, its existence recorded in maps and then forgotten until construction work rediscovered the burials in 2003. The city has since built the African Burying Ground Memorial Park on the site — the only memorial of its kind in New England — and the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail documents the community's full record: the churches, the Pullman porters' neighborhood, the wartime shipyard workers. The modern Portsmouth Black population is small (a few percent of the city), but the heritage infrastructure is the state's Black institutional anchor, a pattern this reference meets in the other small-population seacoast and heritage towns.

Manchester, the state's largest city, holds its largest Black population: roughly 8,000 to 9,000 residents, about a thirteenth of the city, concentrated on the West Side and the east-side neighborhoods around the old mill districts. The community's composition is the modern resettlement story: New Hampshire has been a refugee-receiving state for four decades, and Manchester's arrivals — Somali, Sudanese, Congolese, Burundian, Bosnian (in the European counts), and Bhutanese (in the Asian counts) — made it one of the most diverse small cities in New England, its school district reporting dozens of home languages and Black student shares approaching a tenth. The Queen City's Black institutions — its churches, African community associations, and the state NAACP's Manchester chapter — are built substantially on this newcomer base, layered over the smaller native-born community of the mill and railroad generations.

The small-population caution applies as in Vermont's file: survey levels for 35,000 people swing with samples, and this reference reads the trends. They show a growing population — among New England's faster percentage growth from a small base — with the Manchester resettlement communities and the southern suburbs driving the increase; incomes and attainment in the survey data run near the state's high overall figures for the suburban population and lower in the newcomer communities, composing an average that describes neither. Homeownership follows the same split. The state has no HBCU; the seacoast heritage institutions and Manchester's associations carry the civic layer.

The National Movement Around the State

In New Hampshire, 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. New Hampshire, in the Northeast, 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 New Hampshire.

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

For New Hampshire, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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. Where this general material turns into a specific place is the table below: New Hampshire's own rows.

For New Hampshire, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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 rows tabled below are New Hampshire's, and they are what make the general material local.

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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