State Plates
The Black Population of North Carolina
About 2.5 million Black North Carolinians — just under one in four residents — anchor Charlotte, the Triad, and the Research Triangle. The census profile of a growth state.
Distribution Across the State
For North Carolina, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. North Carolina's institutional distinction is higher education: the state holds about a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, among the most of any state. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, North Carolina's attainment on the other.
The distribution reads at state scale in North Carolina, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. For North Carolina, north Carolina's profile is the series' argument for reading growth and rootedness together. For North Carolina, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, North Carolina sits in the 20 to 29 percent band. Its Black alone share of 22 percent — 9 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 2.5 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads North Carolina two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. North Carolina 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 North Carolina; read the two together. In North Carolina's band — the 20 to 29 percent band — the shaded peers include Alabama, Delaware and South Carolina. In North Carolina, 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 North Carolina exactly as the source agency releases them.
In North Carolina, 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: 22 percent is not a sample of Black North Carolina, it is Black North Carolina measured against all of North Carolina. In North Carolina, 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 North Carolina, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. For North Carolina, the profiles of Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham in the cities section take the two growth metros in detail. Here, on the plate for North Carolina, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
Reading This Plate
In North Carolina, 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 North Carolina; 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 North Carolina plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In North Carolina, the Black alone count holds residents who marked Black and no other race; the alone-or-in-combination count adds residents who marked Black alongside another race. In North Carolina, the second is the larger and the more inclusive, and the gap between them is itself a fact about the place — widest where multiracial identification is most common, narrowest where it is rare. For North Carolina, the alone share of 22 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 2.5 million carries the community's full enumerated size.
For The Black Population of North Carolina, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 22%; Black share, alone or in combination: 23.7%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 2.5 Million. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for North Carolina.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 22% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 23.7% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 2.5 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.