State Plates
The Black Population of Pennsylvania
About 1.66 million Black Pennsylvanians — one in eight residents — anchored by the nation's sixth-largest Black metro and the two oldest HBCUs. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
The distribution reads at state scale in Pennsylvania, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Pennsylvania holds about 1.66 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in eight of its people, with Black alone at about 1.42 million, or 11 percent. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Pennsylvania's table states plainly.
The distribution reads at state scale in Pennsylvania, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Cheyney University, founded in 1837 as the Institute for Colored Youth, is the oldest historically Black institution in the United States; Lincoln University, founded in 1854, was the first degree-granting HBCU and educated a generation of African and Caribbean independence-era leaders alongside its American alumni. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Pennsylvania, but to locate it.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Pennsylvania sits in the 6 to 11 percent band. Its Black alone share of 11 percent — 22 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 1.66 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Pennsylvania two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Pennsylvania 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 Pennsylvania; read the two together. In Pennsylvania's band — the 6 to 11 percent band — the shaded peers include California, Connecticut, Indiana and Kansas. In Pennsylvania, 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 Pennsylvania exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Pennsylvania, 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: 11 percent is not a sample of Black Pennsylvania, it is Black Pennsylvania measured against all of Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, 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 Pennsylvania, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. In Pennsylvania, pennsylvania should be cited as two metro profiles with a shared statehouse: the Philadelphia two-thirds and the Pittsburgh seventh resemble each other less than each resembles its own region. In Pennsylvania, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
Reading This Plate
In Pennsylvania, 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 Pennsylvania; 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 Pennsylvania plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Pennsylvania, the Black alone count holds residents who marked Black and no other race; the alone-or-in-combination count adds residents who marked Black alongside another race. In Pennsylvania, the second is the larger and the more inclusive, and the gap between them is itself a fact about the place — widest where multiracial identification is most common, narrowest where it is rare. For Pennsylvania, the alone share of 11 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 1.66 million carries the community's full enumerated size.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Pennsylvania are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Pennsylvania, a reader who needs the underlying counts will find them in the published tables of the source named below, from which every figure here descends without alteration beyond the rounding the source itself applies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 11% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 12.8% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.66 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.