State Plates
The Black Population of Texas
Texas holds the largest Black population of any state — about four million people, roughly one in seven Texans. The census profile of Black Texas.
Distribution Across the State
For Texas, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Black Texans are concentrated, as the state's population generally is, along the urban triangle formed by Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, and San Antonio, with Austin at its center. The general material becomes a specific place in the table below, in Texas's rows.
The distribution reads at state scale in Texas, where the table's rows give the published count and the share the map draws. Two cautions from this reference's general method apply with force in Texas. The general record is background; the local one — Texas's, in the table — is the subject.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Texas sits in the 12 to 19 percent band. Its Black alone share of 13 percent — 19 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 4 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Texas two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Texas 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 Texas; read the two together. In Texas's band — the 12 to 19 percent band — the shaded peers include Arkansas, Florida, Illinois and Michigan. In Texas, 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 Texas exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Texas, 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: 13 percent is not a sample of Black Texas, it is Black Texas measured against all of Texas. In Texas, 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.
In Texas, that pattern is the plate's whole subject: the table below gives the published share and count, and the map shades the share. In Texas, the state profiles that follow — Florida, New York, and Georgia among them — use the same framework as this one: size by both census measures, distribution between metros and rural counties, the historical formation of the population, and the migration flows currently reshaping it, so that the fifty state accounts in this section can be read side by side. In Texas, held against the national currents, the state's own rows say how its movement stands.
Reading This Plate
In Texas, 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 Texas; 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 Texas plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Texas, 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 Texas, 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 Texas, the alone share of 13 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 4 million carries the community's full enumerated size.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as The Black Population of Texas. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 13%; Black share, alone or in combination: 13.8%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 4 Million. In Texas, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 13% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 13.8% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 4 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.