State Plates

Movement and Change: Black South Carolina

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black South Carolina — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 1.45 million, alone or in combination, 27 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

In South Carolina, for South Carolina, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. South Carolina holds about 1.45 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — more than one in four of its people, with Black alone at about 1.34 million, or 26 percent. South Carolina's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.

For South Carolina, for South Carolina, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. For South Carolina, the coastal Lowcountry holds the state's oldest Black geography. In South Carolina, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national coverage pattern on one side, the state's system on the other.

In South Carolina, in South Carolina, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. For South Carolina, columbia, the capital at the state's center, is about two-fifths Black and anchors the Midlands with South Carolina's largest Black institutional base: Benedict College and Allen University, the state government workforce, and Fort Jackson's military economy. Against the national ladder, the rows below place South Carolina's attainment.

The National Movement Around the State

In South Carolina, 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. South Carolina, in the South, 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 South Carolina.

In South Carolina, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In South Carolina, 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 South Carolina. In South Carolina, 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 South Carolina, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.

Here, on the plate for South Carolina, for South Carolina, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. In South Carolina's case, 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. On one side the national midpoint, on the other the households of South Carolina — that is the comparison this plate invites.

The subject here is Movement and Change: Black South Carolina, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: 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. The plate reports what the sources publish for South Carolina and leaves alone what they do not.

This plate takes up its subject directly: Movement and Change: Black South Carolina. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 27%; Black share, alone or in combination: 28.4%. For South Carolina, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.

How this plate is read, for South Carolina: 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): 27%; Black share, alone or in combination: 28.4%. In South Carolina, 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.

In South Carolina, a closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for South Carolina are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In South Carolina, 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. In South Carolina, this note is written for the movement plate; the companion plates of the same place carry notes of their own.

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.

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