State Plates
Movement and Change: Black Vermont
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Vermont — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 15,000, alone or in combination, 1 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
Small-population statistics carry wide margins, and this reference reports Vermont's with that caution attached: the survey estimates show Black Vermonters' incomes and attainment near or above the state's overall figures in some years (the refugee and university populations pulling in opposite directions within the same small sample), homeownership below the state's famously high rate, and poverty elevated in the resettlement communities' first years. The trend lines are more reliable than the levels: the population is growing — among the faster percentage growth rates in New England from the smallest base — driven by resettlement and the Burlington economy's pull.
The state's Black heritage infrastructure has grown with the population: the Vermont African American Heritage Trail links the Twilight homestead, the Rokeby Museum's Underground Railroad site (the Robinson family's farm, among the best-documented stations in the North), and the Burlington and Rutland congregations into one of the most complete small-state trails in the nation — the institutional form the community's history takes when its population is small and its record is long.
The National Movement Around the State
In Vermont, 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. Vermont, in the Northeast, 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 Vermont.
In Vermont, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Vermont, 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 Vermont. In Vermont, 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 Vermont, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
For Vermont, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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 comparison is two-sided by design: a national ladder against Vermont's attainment.
For Vermont, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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. 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. In Vermont, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, the state's attainment on the other.
Reading This Plate
In Vermont, 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 Vermont; 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 Vermont plate in this atlas stands on.
| 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.