National Plates
Where Black America Lives: The National Distribution Plate
An atlas begins with the simplest question its subject can ask: where does the population live? For Black America, the 2020 Census counted 41.1 million people who identified as Black alone, and 47.2 million who identified as Black alone or in combination with another race — 12.4 percent and 14.2 percent, respectively, of everyone counted in the United States. Those two numbers frame every plate in this atlas, and this opening plate reads them as geography: a population of continental scale with a pronounced southern center of gravity, a set of large metropolitan concentrations in every region, and a long western and northern reach that thins as it spreads.
The southern center of gravity
More than half of all Black Americans — about 56 percent in the 2020 Census — live in the South, the Census Bureau's sixteen-state region running from Delaware and Maryland down through Texas and Oklahoma. The share is not a relic distribution: the South has held the majority of the Black population in every modern census, and its share rose across the most recent decades as migration currents that once ran northward slowed, stopped, and in many corridors reversed. Within the South, the population is itself concentrated. Texas holds the largest Black population of any state, at roughly three and a half million, followed by Georgia and Florida; the deep-South states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina hold smaller counts but the highest shares, a pattern the share plate in this atlas draws in its darkest band.
Shares and counts tell different stories
A choropleth shaded by share and a table ranked by count describe two different countries, and a serious atlas keeps both in view. By share, the map is led by the District of Columbia, at roughly 45 percent Black, then Mississippi at about 38 percent, Louisiana and Georgia at about a third each, Maryland just under a third, and South Carolina and Alabama in the high twenties. By count, the leaders are Texas, Georgia, Florida, New York, North Carolina, and California — states whose Black populations number in the millions even where the share is a modest fraction of a very large whole. Neither reading is the true one alone. Share measures presence within a place; count measures weight within the nation. The plates that follow in the State Plates section give every state both readings, side by side, from the same published counts.
The metropolitan pattern
Black America is also, predominantly, metropolitan. The largest Black populations by metropolitan area gather in New York, Atlanta, Washington, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Los Angeles, and the great majority of Black Americans live in metropolitan areas of some size — a distribution that the Metro Plates section maps three plates at a time for the forty largest. Against that pattern, the atlas holds a second geography with equal care: the rural Black Belt, the crescent of counties across the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas where Black shares run highest of all, in many counties above a third and in some above half. National distribution is the tension between these two geographies — the metro concentrations that hold the largest numbers and the rural arc that holds the deepest shares — and it is the tension this entire atlas is built to keep visible, plate by plate.
What this plate sets in motion
Every choice in the sections that follow descends from this first distribution. The State Plates take the map apart state by state, six plates deep, because a national share conceals fifty different arrangements. The Metro Plates descend another level, to the metropolitan concentrations where most of the population actually gathers, and the Black Belt & Regions section descends to the county, where the deepest shares live. The Thematic Plates then rotate the whole map through income, education, health, housing, and business, asking how the places this plate identifies differ on the measures that describe a life rather than a location. A reader who holds this opening plate firmly — the southern center, the two stories of share and count, the metropolitan pattern, the rural arc — holds the frame into which all six hundred plates fit. The atlas is organized so that any plate can be read alone; it is designed so that reading this one first makes every other plate easier to place.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black population, alone (2020 Census) | 41.1 million |
| Black population, alone or in combination (2020 Census) | 47.2 million |
| Share of the national population, alone | 12.4 percent |
| Share of the national population, alone or in combination | 14.2 percent |
| Share of the Black population living in the South | About 56 percent |
| State with the largest Black population | Texas |
| Highest Black share of a state population | Mississippi, about 38 percent |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile and Demographic and Housing Characteristics File; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey. 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.