State Plates
The Black Population of Oklahoma
About 390,000 Black Oklahomans — one in ten residents — between Oklahoma City, Tulsa's historic Greenwood, and the all-Black towns. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
In Oklahoma, in Oklahoma, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Oklahoma holds about 390,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in ten of its people, with Black alone at about 289,000, or 7.3 percent. For Oklahoma, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
For Oklahoma, in Oklahoma, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Oklahoma City holds the larger share: the capital city is roughly 15 to 16 percent Black (some 105,000 residents), centered historically on the Deep Deuce and the northeast side, with a metro Black population in the range of 155,000 spread through Midwest City (the Tinker Air Force Base suburb, roughly a fifth Black), Del City, Spencer, and the northeast suburbs. Tulsa, the second metro, holds about 110,000 Black residents in its metro — the city itself roughly a sixth Black — concentrated in North Tulsa, the districts beyond the railroad-and-highway line that has divided the city's data for a century. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Oklahoma's particular numbers.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Oklahoma sits in the 6 to 11 percent band. Its Black alone share of 7 percent — 29 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 390,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Oklahoma two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Oklahoma is legible on both readings, and this section of the atlas holds the two side by side.
In Oklahoma, the company a state keeps on the map is set by the legend's bands. In Oklahoma's band — the 6 to 11 percent band — the shaded peers include California, Connecticut, Indiana and Kansas. In Oklahoma, 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 Oklahoma exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Oklahoma, 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: 7 percent is not a sample of Black Oklahoma, it is Black Oklahoma measured against all of Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, 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.
Here, on the plate for Oklahoma, in Oklahoma, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Greenwood, Tulsa's Black district, was by 1921 the most prosperous Black business community in America — its hotels, theaters, professional offices, and hundreds of businesses earning it the 'Black Wall Street' name — until the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed some 35 blocks of it, a destruction the state's own commission documented in full a century later; the district's modern form, rebuilt by its survivors and now anchored by the Greenwood Cultural Center and a history center at its edge, is the state's central heritage site. Held against the national ladder, Oklahoma's own rows say where its attainment stands.
Read for Oklahoma, in Oklahoma, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. Langston University, founded in 1897 in the all-Black town of the same name, is the state's HBCU and the West's historically Black land-grant — enrollment in the range of 2,000 — anchoring the town that shares its name and the state's Black professional formation. The second distinctive thread is tribal: the Freedmen — the formerly enslaved people held by the Five Tribes and their descendants, citizens of the tribal nations under the 1866 treaties in provisions the tribal courts and federal rulings of the current era have been re-litigating and, in the Cherokee and other nations' recent decisions, substantially affirming — form a Black Oklahoma population inside the tribal data as well as the state's, concentrated in the eastern counties (Muskogee, Okmulgee, Tahlequah's region) where the tribal nations are headquartered. Read for Oklahoma, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 7% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 9.8% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 390,000 |
| 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.