State Plates
Movement and Change: Black North Dakota
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black North Dakota — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 42,000, alone or in combination, 4 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
North Dakota holds about 42,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in nineteen of its people, with Black alone at about 26,000, or 3.3 percent. No small state's Black population has changed more in a generation: the 1990 census counted Black North Dakotans in the low thousands, and the population has multiplied through refugee resettlement centered on Fargo, the Bakken oil boom, and the Air Force's two northern-tier bases. This article profiles the population in the census data.
The modern population is substantially a Fargo population, and Fargo's is substantially a New American one. Lutheran Social Services' resettlement program made the Fargo-Moorhead metro one of the nation's highest per-capita receiving sites from the 1990s: Somali, Sudanese, Liberian, Congolese, Ethiopian, and Eritrean communities, alongside Bosnian and Bhutanese cohorts in other categories, settled in the metro's apartment corridors and then its suburbs, until the Black population of the city of Fargo reached roughly a twelfth of its residents — the most dramatic small-city transformation in the northern plains, surpassing in speed even Lewiston's. The institutions followed the resettlement pattern at fast-forward: African markets and mosques, the metro's school districts reporting Black enrollments approaching a tenth, North Dakota State University's growing African student presence, and a second generation now entering the workforce the boom built.
The survey data for a young, newcomer-heavy population of 42,000 describe motion more than position: incomes rising with tenure in the resettlement cohorts, the oil and base layers at federal and industry scales, educational pipelines (NDSU, UND, the tribal colleges' small Black enrollments) in formation. The estimates show the population among the nation's fastest-growing in percentage terms across the century's censuses — from roughly 0.6 percent of the state in 1990 to over 5 percent in combination counts today — a transformation the state's overall growth makes possible and its age structure (North Dakota is among the younger states by its energy and university poles) sustains.
The National Movement Around the State
In North Dakota, 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 Dakota, in the Midwest, 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 Dakota.
In North Dakota, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In North Dakota, 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 Dakota. In North Dakota, 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 Dakota, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
In North Dakota, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. On this plate — the plate for North Dakota — black North Dakota's early record is the plains pattern at its thinnest: Black soldiers at Fort Abraham Lincoln and Fort Totten, porters and barbers in the railroad towns (Fargo, Grand Forks, Bismarck, Minot), a small Fargo congregation tradition, and individual homesteaders in the settlement era — a population the censuses counted in the hundreds through the territory's first decades and in the low thousands across the twentieth century. The table is where the general pattern becomes North Dakota's own figures.
In North Dakota, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. The Bakken shale boom drew Black workers to the Williston Basin in the 2000s and 2010s — the oil counties' Black counts multiplied from near zero in the boom censuses, in the Wyoming energy pattern at greater amplitude — and the bust cycles thinned them in turn. For North Dakota, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 4% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 5.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 42,000 |
| 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.