State Plates
The Black Population of Tennessee
About 1.25 million Black Tennesseans — nearly one in five residents — across Memphis, Nashville's HBCU row, and the state's river cities. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
The distribution reads at state scale in Tennessee, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Tennessee holds about 1.25 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in five of its people, with Black alone at about 1.13 million, or 16 percent. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Tennessee; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
The distribution reads at state scale in Tennessee, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. West Tennessee holds the state's Black center of gravity. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Tennessee stands so the plate can be read.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Tennessee sits in the 12 to 19 percent band. Its Black alone share of 17 percent — 11 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 1.25 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Tennessee two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Tennessee 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 Tennessee; read the two together. In Tennessee's band — the 12 to 19 percent band — the shaded peers include Arkansas, Florida, Illinois and Michigan. In Tennessee, 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 Tennessee exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Tennessee, 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: 17 percent is not a sample of Black Tennessee, it is Black Tennessee measured against all of Tennessee. In Tennessee, 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 Tennessee, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Fisk University, founded in 1866 and home of the Jubilee Singers who carried spirituals to the world; Meharry Medical College, founded in 1876 and for generations the training ground of a very large share of the nation's Black physicians and dentists; Tennessee State University, the public land-grant HBCU; and American Baptist College form a cluster within a mile of one another — four Black institutions of national significance in one neighborhood, a concentration no other American city replicates. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national ladder, and the attainment recorded in Tennessee.
In Tennessee, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. The Tri-Cities of the northeast record the state's smallest Black shares, in the low single digits — the other end of a state distribution that runs from Memphis's near-half to the mountains' few percent. Tennessee's rows, read against the national ladder, state where its attainment stands.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The Black Population of Tennessee — because the published record supports one. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 17%; Black share, alone or in combination: 18%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.25 Million. In Tennessee, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The Black Population of Tennessee — because the published record supports one. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 17%; Black share, alone or in combination: 18%. For Tennessee, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 17% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 18% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.25 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.