State Plates
North Carolina: Counties and Places
In North Carolina, every atlas needs a page where a state stops being a shaded tile and becomes a list of places. This plate is that page for North Carolina: its counties and communities in their order, the metros the atlas files separately, and the pattern they make together — a Black population of 2.5 million, alone or in combination, 22% of the state on the alone count, ranked 9 of fifty-one geographies by that share.
The State's Black Places
The atlas's place files give North Carolina a measurable urban structure. Its profiled metros include Charlotte (about 300,000 Black residents, 35% of the metro); Greensboro (about 125,000 Black residents, 43% of the metro); Fayetteville (about 95,000 Black residents, 43% of the metro); Durham (about 95,000 Black residents, 38% of the metro). Short by design, this entry's work is placement rather than narration; the plates behind the page carry North Carolina's narration in full.
In North Carolina, the order of that list is the state's urban hierarchy in Black population terms, and it need not match the hierarchy by total population: a metro can rank lower overall and higher here, which is precisely the kind of fact an atlas of one population exists to surface. In North Carolina, the hierarchy above is computed from the same published counts as every other figure in this section, so the state's places can be compared with the places of any other state on identical terms.
Counties and the Pattern Between Places
Between the named metros lies the county pattern, and in North Carolina it carries the older geography: county seats where Black settlement predates the metros, corridors along the historic routes of movement, and — in the state's band of the national map, shaded at 22% — the rural counties whose shares run higher than the state's average even as their counts run small. In North Carolina, the tile map shades the state as one tile; this plate exists to say what the tile contains.
Read against the region, North Carolina's place pattern is a South pattern with its own inflection. The South's Black geography is the subject of the regional plates in this atlas, and North Carolina contributes 2.5 million Black residents to it. In North Carolina, the state's largest places anchor its contribution; its counties distribute it. In North Carolina, both halves are on this page because both halves are the state.
How Places Are Counted Here
In North Carolina, the place figures in this atlas come in two kinds, and the plate keeps them labeled. In North Carolina, metro figures describe metropolitan statistical areas — counties grouped by commuting, as the federal system defines them — while the state figures describe the state whole. A metro can cross a state line; where one of North Carolina's profiled metros does, its full count stands in the metro file and its North Carolina portion stands in the state's story, and the tables say which is which. In North Carolina, precision about boundaries is not pedantry in an atlas; it is the difference between a map and a picture of a map.
Using This Plate
The Counties and Places plate is the index to everything else the atlas holds for North Carolina: the six state plates for the whole population, the metro plates for each profiled place, and the gazetteer pages that open each place's file. In North Carolina, a reader who begins here can reach any of them with the state's structure already in mind — which places are large, which are old, which are growing — and a reader who ends here has the whole state in one view. That double duty, index and summary at once, is what this seventh North Carolina plate is for.
In North Carolina, one further note belongs on the record of this plate: place data ages at different speeds. The definitions differ by the multiracial population — a real and growing count, small against shares like North Carolina's. The figures here are the published ones as of the build of this atlas, and the structure they reveal — the ranking of North Carolina's places, the weight of its metros against its counties — is built to survive the next revision of every number on the page.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for North Carolina are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. The underlying counts for North Carolina live in the published tables of the source named below; every figure here descends from them without alteration beyond the rounding the source itself applies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 22% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 2.5 Million |
| Black residents of the Charlotte metro | 300,000 |
| Black residents of the Greensboro metro | 125,000 |
| Black residents of the Fayetteville metro | 95,000 |
| Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination | 52.8 million |
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.