State Plates

Movement and Change: Black South Dakota

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black South Dakota — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 32,000, alone or in combination, 2 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

Sioux Falls is a designated resettlement center, and its defining arrival came in the early 2000s, when the United States resettled the 'Lost Boys' of Sudan — the unaccompanied minors of the Sudanese civil war whose story became internationally known — and South Dakota received a notable cohort of them, alongside the broader Sudanese community that followed through family reunification and secondary migration. Ethiopian, Somali, Congolese, Liberian, and Eritrean arrivals layered after, until the city of Sioux Falls' Black population reached roughly 6 to 7 percent of its 200,000 residents — the highest sustained share of any city in either Dakota — centered in the city's north and east districts, its African markets and churches along the Minnesota Avenue and east-side corridors, and its meatpacking and health-care workforces (the packing plants of Sioux Falls and the surrounding towns, and the two great health systems, are the community's largest employers). The metro's suburbs (Brandon, Harrisburg, Tea) hold the community's homeowner growth.

The survey picture for 32,000 people is the resettlement profile in plains form: a young population, newcomer incomes on the rising tenure curve, the packing-and-health workforce's steady wages, attainment building through Southeast Tech and the universities. The estimates show Black South Dakota growing at rates well above the state's — Sioux Falls' boom economy (banking charters, health systems, logistics) pulling both the domestic and the international streams — with the Black share of the state rising census by census from its 1 percent twentieth-century plateau.

The cultural layer has its institutions now: Sioux Falls' African community celebrations, its Sudanese and Ethiopian congregations (some worshipping in the city's older church buildings, in the succession pattern of every resettlement profile in this section), and a growing shelf of memoir and scholarship from the Lost Boys generation itself — the community documenting its own arrival in the first person, a stage the older Black communities of this reference reached in print a century ago.

The National Movement Around the State

In South Dakota, 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 Dakota, in the Midwest, 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 Dakota.

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

In South Dakota, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. In South Dakota's case, held against the national pattern, the state's own rows say how its coverage stands.

The migration currents read locally in South Dakota, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. On this plate — the plate for 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. An atlas benchmark earns its place by locating South Dakota, never by ranking it.

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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