State Plates
The Black Population of South Carolina
About 1.45 million Black South Carolinians — more than one in four residents — in a state that was majority Black into the twentieth century. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
In South Carolina, for South Carolina, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. For South Carolina, black South Carolinians record indicators near the Southern pattern: income and attainment below national Black averages in the rural counties, near them in Columbia and Charleston's suburbs, with the state's Black professional class concentrated in the capital's public and university sectors and in the health systems of the three metros. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, South Carolina's households on the other.
The distribution reads at state scale in South Carolina, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. South Carolina's profile is the series' study in demographic depth: a state whose Black majority lasted into living memory's grandparents, whose African cultural retention is the strongest on the mainland, and whose contemporary figures — 1.45 million people, more than one in four — describe continuity under transformation. In South Carolina, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, South Carolina sits in the 20 to 29 percent band. Its Black alone share of 27 percent — 6 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 1.45 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads South Carolina two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. South Carolina 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 South Carolina; read the two together. In South Carolina's band — the 20 to 29 percent band — the shaded peers include Alabama, Delaware and North Carolina. In South Carolina, 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 South Carolina exactly as the source agency releases them.
In South Carolina, 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: 27 percent is not a sample of Black South Carolina, it is Black South Carolina measured against all of South Carolina. In South Carolina, 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 South Carolina, for South Carolina, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. In South Carolina, charleston and Columbia receive full profiles in the cities section, and the sea-island communities of the coast are treated in the county profiles accompanying this state account. For South Carolina, 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 South Carolina, 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 South Carolina; 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 South Carolina plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In South Carolina, 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 South Carolina, 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 South Carolina, the alone share of 27 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 1.45 million carries the community's full enumerated size.
The Longer View
In South Carolina, no single release of the federal data settles the story of a place, and this atlas is built to be re-read as the counts accumulate. In South Carolina, what a plate fixes is the structure: where the population stands, in what company on the map, and against which national lines it should be measured. For South Carolina, in the South, that structure is now on the page — and every future count for the state will be read against it, which is precisely what an atlas is for.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 27% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 28.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.45 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.