State Plates
The Black Population of Ohio
About 1.65 million Black Ohioans — one in seven residents — across Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and the industrial cities of the lake and river.
Distribution Across the State
In Ohio, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Ohio holds about 1.65 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — about one in seven of its people, with Black alone at about 1.5 million, or 13 percent. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Ohio's particular numbers.
For Ohio, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Between the metros stands the belt: Dayton, more than two-fifths Black, a manufacturing city whose Black community was built by the auto and appliance industries; Toledo, about a quarter Black, the lake port; Akron, roughly a quarter to a third Black, the rubber city; Youngstown, about two-fifths Black, whose steel collapse made it a national case in the industrial-decline literature; and Lorain, Canton, Lima, and Springfield behind them. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Ohio's households on the other.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Ohio sits in the 12 to 19 percent band. Its Black alone share of 13 percent — 18 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 1.65 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Ohio two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Ohio 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 Ohio; read the two together. In Ohio's band — the 12 to 19 percent band — the shaded peers include Arkansas, Florida, Illinois and Michigan. In Ohio, 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 Ohio exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Ohio, 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: 13 percent is not a sample of Black Ohio, it is Black Ohio measured against all of Ohio. In Ohio, 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.
For Ohio, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Wilberforce University, founded in 1856 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, is the nation's oldest private historically Black university; Central State University, its public neighbor in the same village, began as a Wilberforce department and became Ohio's public land-grant HBCU. In Ohio, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
For Ohio, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. The Oberlin community, founded around its college in the same era, became the North's most famous abolitionist town and educated Black students from the 1830s onward. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Ohio's attainment on the other.
Reading This Plate
In Ohio, 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 Ohio; 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 Ohio plate in this atlas stands on.
How this plate is read, for Ohio: 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): 13%; Black share, alone or in combination: 14%. In Ohio, the two presentations are one record in two forms, and a reader who checks one against the other has the plate's whole method in hand.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 13% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 14% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.65 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.