State Plates
Movement and Change: Black Utah
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Utah — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 70,000, alone or in combination, 1 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
Utah holds about 70,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in forty-seven of its people, with Black alone at about 39,000, or 1.2 percent. Utah's Black population is among the smallest in share in this reference and among the fastest-growing in percentage terms — a frontier-pioneer layer, a military and railroad layer, and a modern layer of refugees and tech-era migrants in the Salt Lake Valley. This article profiles the population in the census data.
Black Utah's founding story is singular in the western record. Jane Elizabeth Manning, a free Black convert from Connecticut, walked much of the way to Nauvoo and then crossed the plains to reach the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 — among the very first Black residents of Utah — and her family's petitions and faithfulness across the following century made the Mannings the most documented Black pioneer family in the state; the Latter-day Saint movement's own historical scholarship has restored her to the center of the pioneer narrative in the current era. A handful of enslaved people were brought by southern converts in the same migration (Utah legalized a form of slavery by territorial statute in its early years, abolished in 1862), and the free Black community of Salt Lake City — porters, barbers, the Calvary Baptist congregation (founded 1890s era) — formed around the railroad economy after 1869, when the transcontinental junction at Ogden made that city the West's rail crossroads and its 25th Street a famous, rough, multicultural strip with a Black community at its core.
Salt Lake City is one of the interior West's significant refugee-resettlement hubs, and its African communities — Sudanese (among the earlier and larger groups), Somali, Congolese, Burundian, Ethiopian, and Eritrean — form a substantial share of the state's Black population growth in the past two decades. The resettlement geography (South Salt Lake, the west-side valley districts, and the suburbs as families stabilize) mirrors Lewiston's and Omaha's patterns at valley scale, and the second generation is now the Salt Lake school districts' fastest-changing data. Layered with them are the tech corridor's professionals (the 'Silicon Slopes' economy of Lehi-to-Draper), the university communities, and Black Latter-day Saint families whose presence in the state's majority faith is a small but institutionally significant strand the church's own publications document.
The National Movement Around the State
In Utah, 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. Utah, in the West, 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 Utah.
In Utah, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Utah, 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 Utah. In Utah, 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 Utah, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
In Utah, that national movement pattern arrives as local gain or loss, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Utah.
| 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.