State Plates
The Black Population of Vermont
About 15,000 Black Vermonters — one in forty residents — in the state that produced America's first Black college graduate. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
Vermont holds about 15,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in forty of its people, with Black alone at about 9,500, or 1.5 percent. It is one of the smallest Black populations in this reference, and it contains one of the largest historical facts in the education data: the first bachelor's degree earned by a Black American was awarded in Vermont, in 1823. The modern population is centered in the Burlington metro and shaped, in its newest layer, by refugee resettlement in Burlington and Winooski.
Alexander Twilight — Middlebury College class of 1823, schoolmaster, minister, and the first Black American to serve in a state legislature (Vermont's, from 1836) — built the Old Stone House in Brownington that now anchors the state's Black heritage trail. He is the most famous figure of an early Black Vermont that also included the Pullman-porter and farm families of the Connecticut River valley, the Black congregations of Burlington and Rutland from the early nineteenth century, and Rutland's and Woodstock's small Black communities around the resort and rail economies. Vermont's constitutional abolition of adult slavery (1777, the first of the American states) framed the free community's entire history — a fact the state's Black heritage institutions document, alongside the complications (child indenture persisted; the Underground Railroad ran through the farm country) the honest record includes.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Vermont sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 1 percent — 50 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 15,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Vermont two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Vermont 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 Vermont; read the two together. In Vermont's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii. In Vermont, 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 Vermont exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Vermont, 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 Vermont, it is Black Vermont measured against all of Vermont. In Vermont, 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.
The modern population is a Burlington-metro population above all. Burlington itself is roughly 5 to 6 percent Black, and its sister city Winooski — the old mill city across the river — records a Black and African share among the highest in northern New England relative to its size, built by Vermont's role as a refugee-resettlement state: Somali, Sudanese, Congolese, Burundian, and Bhutanese (counted separately in the Asian data) communities settled from the 1990s onward in the Burlington-Winooski corridor and, in smaller numbers, in Rutland and Brattleboro. The resettlement pattern makes Vermont's Black population among the most foreign-born in the nation in percentage terms, and its second generation the defining cohort of the Burlington school district's diversity data — in the state's largest school systems, Black students form shares several times the state average.
Outside Chittenden County, Black Vermont thins to the nation's minimum: the Northeast Kingdom, the southern valleys, and the mountain towns record Black populations in the dozens to low hundreds per county, composed of individual families, the college towns' communities (Middlebury, Bennington, Norwich), and the small historic congregations. The university layer — the University of Vermont in Burlington enrolls the largest Black student population in the state, at a share in the low single digits — functions as one of the community's principal institutions by default, as in the other small-population states of this reference (Maine, New Hampshire, the Dakotas), alongside the Black church network and the state's African community associations.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 2.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 15,000 |
| 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.