State Plates
Movement and Change: Black North Carolina
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black North Carolina — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 2.5 million, alone or in combination, 22 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
For North Carolina, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. North Carolina holds about 2.5 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — just under one in four of its people, with Black alone at about 2.2 million, or 21 percent. In North Carolina, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national currents on one side, the state's arrivals and departures on the other.
In North Carolina, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. For North Carolina, the state's Black geography follows its famous three-part division. For North Carolina, held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
For North Carolina, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. In North Carolina, after Georgia, no state gains more from Black America's southward redistribution. In North Carolina, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national coverage pattern on one side, the state's system on the other.
The National Movement Around the State
In North Carolina, 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. North Carolina, in the South, 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 North Carolina.
In North Carolina, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In North Carolina, 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 North Carolina. In North Carolina, 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 North Carolina, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
The migration currents read locally in North Carolina, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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 point of the benchmark is position: where North Carolina stands, stated before anything is made of it.
For North Carolina, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. In North Carolina's case, north Carolina's profile is the series' argument for reading growth and rootedness together. Here, on the plate for North Carolina, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Movement and Change: Black North Carolina. 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. In North Carolina, the atlas asks no more of the material than the material can state.
This plate takes up its subject directly: Movement and Change: Black North Carolina. How this plate is read, for North Carolina: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black share of the state population (alone): 22%; Black share, alone or in combination: 23.7%. For North Carolina, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
The record behind this plate of North Carolina 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 North Carolina, 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) | 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.