State Plates
Movement and Change: Black Texas
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Texas — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 4 million, alone or in combination, 13 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
For Texas, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. The decennial census counted about four million Black Texans — Black alone or in combination with another race — roughly 13.8 percent of the state's population, with Black alone accounting for about 3.6 million, or 12.2 percent. The rows tabled below are Texas's, and they are what make the general material local.
For Texas, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Enslaved people were brought to Mexican Texas in the 1820s and 1830s, and by the Civil War the enslaved population exceeded 180,000, concentrated in the cotton counties of East and Central Texas. Emancipation in Texas is commemorated as Juneteenth, marking the announcement of the emancipation order in Galveston in 1865, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. In Texas, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national currents on one side, the state's arrivals and departures on the other.
For Texas, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. The defining feature of the modern data is growth. The plate sets the national ladder beside Texas's attainment and invites the two-sided reading.
The National Movement Around the State
In Texas, 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. Texas, 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 Texas.
In Texas, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Texas, 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 Texas. In Texas, 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 Texas, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
In Texas, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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 table is where the general pattern becomes Texas's own figures.
In Texas, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Two cautions from this reference's general method apply with force in Texas. Read against the table, the broad pattern settles into the specific numbers that belong to Texas.
This plate takes up its subject directly: Movement and Change: Black 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, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Movement and Change: Black Texas. How this plate is read, for Texas: 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): 13%; Black share, alone or in combination: 13.8%. In Texas, read with its table, the plate states the record and lets the record speak.
In Texas, the record behind this plate of Texas is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. The table's benchmark row for Texas states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis.
| 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.