State Plates
The Black Population of New Jersey
About 1.45 million Black New Jerseyans — one in six residents — along the New York–Philadelphia corridor, from Newark to Camden. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
For New Jersey, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. New Jersey holds about 1.45 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in six of its people, with Black alone at about 1.22 million, or 13 percent. It is in the rows below — New Jersey's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
In New Jersey, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Black New Jersey suburbanized early and thoroughly. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of New Jersey.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, New Jersey sits in the 12 to 19 percent band. Its Black alone share of 14 percent — 17 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 1.45 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads New Jersey two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. New Jersey 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 Jersey; read the two together. In New Jersey's band — the 12 to 19 percent band — the shaded peers include Arkansas, Florida, Illinois and Michigan. In New Jersey, 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 Jersey exactly as the source agency releases them.
In New Jersey, 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: 14 percent is not a sample of Black New Jersey, it is Black New Jersey measured against all of New Jersey. In New Jersey, 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 distribution reads at state scale in New Jersey, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. In New Jersey, new Jersey is the largest Black-population state in the nation with no historically Black college or university — a distinction its Black students answer by feeding the HBCUs of Pennsylvania (Lincoln, Cheyney), Delaware (Delaware State), and the South at high rates in the enrollment data. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank New Jersey, but to locate it.
In New Jersey, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The state's Black political geography follows the same corridor: its largest cities have elected Black mayors across most of the past half-century, and its Black legislative delegation is drawn overwhelmingly from the Essex-to-Camden band — a concentration the district maps share with the population maps. The table is where the general pattern becomes New Jersey's own figures.
The distribution reads at state scale in New Jersey, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. New Jersey's profile is the corridor state's: 1.45 million people whose labor markets, media, and often identities belong to two great metros outside its borders. In New Jersey, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
This plate takes up its subject directly: The Black Population of New Jersey. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 14%; Black share, alone or in combination: 15.6%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.45 Million. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for New Jersey.
The record behind this plate of New Jersey is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Where the table carries a national benchmark row for New Jersey, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 14% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 15.6% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.45 Million |
| 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.