State Plates

Movement and Change: Black Virginia

Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Virginia — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 1.85 million, alone or in combination, 19 percent of the state on the alone count.

Growth and Migration

For Virginia, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Virginia holds about 1.85 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — about one in five of its people, with Black alone at about 1.6 million, or 19 percent. No state frames Black America's arc more completely: the first enslaved Africans in English America arrived at Point Comfort, in present-day Hampton, in 1619; Richmond became the domestic slave trade's second city and the capital of the Confederacy; and the modern commonwealth holds a Black population that is simultaneously rural-rooted in the Southside tobacco country, urban in Richmond and Hampton Roads, and suburban in the counties outside Washington. Below are the rows where the general becomes specific — they are Virginia's own, tabled for exactly that turn.

The migration currents read locally in Virginia, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. For Virginia, the Hampton Roads region — Norfolk, Hampton, Newport News, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach, and their neighbors — holds the state's largest Black concentration and its oldest. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Virginia's own record, stated plainly in the table.

For Virginia, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. Prince William County holds one of the largest Black suburban populations in the region — well above 100,000 and growing with the county's overall boom — and Fairfax, Loudoun, Stafford, and Spotsylvania counties record Black populations that are small in share but large and rising in count. The specific place inside this general material is found below, in Virginia's tabled rows.

The National Movement Around the State

In Virginia, 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. Virginia, in the South, 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 Virginia.

In Virginia, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Virginia, 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 Virginia. In Virginia, 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 Virginia, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.

The migration currents read locally in Virginia, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. Rank is not the benchmark's business — location is, and Virginia is located by it here.

The migration currents read locally in Virginia, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. In Virginia's case, 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. The general record is background; the local one — Virginia's, in the table — is the subject.

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.

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