State Plates
The Black Population of Virginia
About 1.85 million Black Virginians — one in five residents — in the state where the first enslaved Africans arrived in 1619 and where Richmond was slavery's industrial capital.
Distribution Across the State
For Virginia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. Richmond, the capital, is more than two-fifths Black, a city whose Black history runs from Gabriel's planned rebellion and the slave markets of Shockoe Bottom to the Jackson Ward district — once called the Harlem of the South, a center of Black banking and business that included Maggie Walker's founding of the first chartered bank by a woman of any race in the nation. In Virginia, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
For Virginia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. For Virginia, one further layer belongs in the state account: Virginia's Black population includes one of the nation's larger African immigrant communities in its northern counties — Ethiopian, Ghanaian, and Nigerian communities concentrated around Alexandria, Arlington, and Prince William — alongside growing Caribbean settlement in Hampton Roads and Richmond, so that the commonwealth's oldest Black population is now joined, measurably, by its newest. Below, the table's rows belong to Virginia, and there the general becomes particular.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Virginia sits in the 12 to 19 percent band. Its Black alone share of 19 percent — 10 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 1.85 million alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Virginia two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Virginia 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 Virginia; read the two together. In Virginia's band — the 12 to 19 percent band — the shaded peers include Arkansas, Florida, Illinois and Michigan. In Virginia, 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 Virginia exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Virginia, 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: 19 percent is not a sample of Black Virginia, it is Black Virginia measured against all of Virginia. In Virginia, 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.
For Virginia, the pattern is not background but subject; the state's own rows, tabled below, carry it. In Virginia, virginia's profile closes the Atlantic South sequence of this section. Where this general material turns into a specific place is the table below: Virginia's own rows.
Reading This Plate
In Virginia, 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 Virginia; 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 Virginia plate in this atlas stands on.
A note on the two counts this atlas uses throughout. In Virginia, 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 Virginia, 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 Virginia, the alone share of 19 percent drives the shading, while the combination count of 1.85 million carries the community's full enumerated size.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 19% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 21.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.85 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.