State Plates

Movement and Change: Black New Jersey

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black New Jersey — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 1.45 million, alone or in combination, 14 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

For New Jersey, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Newark, the state's largest city at about 311,000 people, is roughly half Black — about 150,000 residents — the center of Black New Jersey since the Great Migration filled its Central Ward and the districts beyond. The county's Black population approaches 300,000. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national midpoint, and the households of New Jersey.

The migration currents read locally in New Jersey, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. In New Jersey, the corridor's diversity layers through the Black data as well: New Jersey holds one of the nation's larger Caribbean Black populations (Jamaican and Haitian communities across Essex and Union counties) and growing African communities, so that the state's Black foreign-born share is among the highest in this section's state profiles. Rank is not the benchmark's business — location is, and New Jersey is located by it here.

The National Movement Around the State

In New Jersey, 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 Jersey, 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 Jersey.

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

The migration currents read locally in New Jersey, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens New Jersey's own record, stated plainly in the table.

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

Reading This Plate

In New Jersey, 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 Jersey; 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 Jersey plate in this atlas stands on.

The subject here is Movement and Change: Black New Jersey, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. 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. In New Jersey, what the sources publish, the plate reports; what they do not, it leaves alone.

Filed in this series as Movement and Change: Black New Jersey, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 14%; Black share, alone or in combination: 15.6%. Here, on the plate for New Jersey, read with its table, the plate states the record and lets the record speak.

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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