State Plates
Movement and Change: Black New York
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black New York — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 3.6 million, alone or in combination, 16 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
In New York, in New York, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. In New York, new York City's roughly two million Black residents — profiled in full in the cities section — form the core of the state total, and the surrounding suburban counties hold much of the rest. It is in the table that the pattern takes New York's particular shape.
For New York, in New York, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Rochester records a Black share near 40 percent — among the highest of any mid-sized American city — and Syracuse near 30 percent. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how New York's households stand.
In New York, the migration currents read locally in New York, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. In New York, no state's Black population is as international as New York's. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank New York; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The National Movement Around the State
In New York, 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 York, 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 York.
In New York, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In New York, 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 York. In New York, 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 York, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
For New York, the migration currents read locally in New York, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. New York State holds about 3.6 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly 18 percent of its population, with Black alone at about three million, or 15 percent. The general record is background; the local one — New York's, in the table — is the subject.
This plate takes up its subject directly: Movement and Change: Black New York. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 16%; Black share, alone or in combination: 17.9%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 3.6 Million. The plate states New York's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Movement and Change: Black New York. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Here, on the plate for New York, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of New York: Black residents, alone or in combination: 3.6 Million; Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination (Census Bureau population estimates): 52.8 million. The measures above and these together fix the population of New York as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
Filed in this series as Movement and Change: Black New York, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 16%; Black share, alone or in combination: 17.9%. In New York, what the sources publish, the plate reports; what they do not, it leaves alone.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 16% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 17.9% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 3.6 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.