State Plates
The Black Population of Utah
About 70,000 Black Utahns — one in forty-seven residents — in the fastest-growing small Black population of the Mountain West. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
The modern population centers overwhelmingly in the Salt Lake Valley: Salt Lake City itself is roughly 3 percent Black, with West Valley City (the valley's second city) at a somewhat higher share, and the suburban corridor — Taylorsville, Murray, Sandy, Midvale — holding a dispersed majority of the metro's Black residents. Ogden, the old railroad city, records the state's highest sustained share among its larger cities (in the range of 3 to 4 percent), anchored by Hill Air Force Base in adjoining Davis County. The military thread runs throughout: Hill AFB, the Tooele depot legacy, and Dugway cycle Black service families through the northern counties. Beyond the Wasatch Front, the state records Black shares under 1 percent in most counties, with the university towns (Logan, Provo, Cedar City, St. George) holding small institution-shaped communities.
Utah's profile is the pioneer paradox: the Black community with perhaps the most remarkable founding story of any western state — a woman who crossed the plains on foot in 1847 to join a faith that would not fully open its priesthood to her descendants until 1978 — remains one of the smallest in the data, and one of the fastest-growing. Both facts are the profile, and the distance between 1847 and the present estimates is its true subject.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Utah sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 1 percent — 49 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 70,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Utah two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Utah 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 Utah; read the two together. In Utah's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii. In Utah, 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 Utah exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Utah, 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: 1 percent is not a sample of Black Utah, it is Black Utah measured against all of Utah. In Utah, 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.
Reading This Plate
In Utah, 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 Utah; 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 Utah plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Utah, 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 Utah, 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 Utah, the alone share of 1 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 70,000 carries the community's full enumerated size.
Filed in this series as The Black Population of Utah, the plate below states the published record for its subject and reads it closely. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 1%; Black share, alone or in combination: 2.1%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 70,000. In Utah, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 2.1% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 70,000 |
| 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.