State Plates
The Black Population of South Dakota
About 32,000 Black South Dakota residents — one in twenty-eight — centered on Sioux Falls, where the 'Lost Boys' of Sudan made their American home. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
South Dakota holds about 32,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twenty-eight of its people, with Black alone at about 18,000, or 2 percent. Two-thirds of them live in and around Sioux Falls, the state's banking-and-health metropolis, whose Black community was reshaped at the century's turn by one of the most famous refugee resettlements in the American record. This article profiles the population, completing the census section's fifty-state survey.
In South Dakota, black South Dakota's early record follows the Dakota pattern: Black regulars at Fort Randall, Fort Sisseton, and the Missouri River posts; the Black Hills gold rush drawing Black prospectors, cooks, and entrepreneurs to Deadwood and Lead (the Hills' Black population in the rush decades was small but documented, including business owners on Deadwood's main street); the railroad towns of the Milwaukee and Northwestern lines; and the small congregations of Yankton, Mitchell, and Sioux Falls. The twentieth century's population held in the low thousands — railroad, service, and the Ellsworth (then Rapid City) Air Force Base community after the Second World War — until resettlement rewrote the state's file in a single decade.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, South Dakota sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 2 percent — 46 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 32,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads South Dakota two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. South Dakota 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 Dakota; read the two together. In South Dakota's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii. In South Dakota, 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 Dakota exactly as the source agency releases them.
In South Dakota, 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: 2 percent is not a sample of Black South Dakota, it is Black South Dakota measured against all of South Dakota. In South Dakota, 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.
Rapid City, the Black Hills gateway, holds the second community — a few percent of the city, on Ellsworth Air Force Base's workforce (the B-1 base east of the city) and the Hills' service economy, with a small historic layer of its own. Aberdeen, Brookings (South Dakota State), and Vermillion (the university) hold small institution-shaped communities; the Missouri River and farm counties record the plains minimum; the reservation counties' tables are dominated, as in North Dakota, by their Native majorities, with Black residents in the dozens to hundreds. The state's Black institutions are Sioux Falls-centered by arithmetic: its African community organizations, its Black churches old and new, and the state historical society's documentation of the Hills and fort eras.
Reading This Plate
In South Dakota, 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 Dakota; 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 Dakota plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In South Dakota, 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 Dakota, 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 Dakota, the alone share of 2 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 32,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 2% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 3.6% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 32,000 |
| 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.