State Plates
The Black Population of Wyoming
About 12,000 Black Wyoming residents — one in forty-eight — in the nation's least populous state, rooted in its forts and railroads. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
Wyoming holds about 12,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in forty-eight of its people, with Black alone at about 5,500, or 1 percent. Wyoming is the least populous state in the union, and its Black population is correspondingly the reference's smallest in absolute terms after Vermont's — a community of fort towns, railroad divisions, and one capital city, whose history runs through the Black regulars of the frontier Army.
Black Wyoming was born at the posts. Fort D. A. Russell at Cheyenne (now F.E. Warren Air Force Base) hosted Black regiments of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry across the frontier decades, and Fort McKinney (at Buffalo), Fort Washakie, and Fort Bridger rotated Black companies through the territory; their veterans and laundresses and cooks formed the nucleus of Cheyenne's and Laramie's small Black neighborhoods. The Union Pacific's Wyoming division towns — Cheyenne, Laramie, Rawlins, Green River, Evanston — added the railroad layer: porters, dining-car crews, and roundhouse workers whose families persisted in the division-point communities. The coal camp at Hanna and the trona and oil towns of the twentieth century added increments; the state's Black population peaked, in share terms, in the early territorial censuses and has run near 1 percent since.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, Wyoming sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 1 percent — 51 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 12,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads Wyoming two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. Wyoming 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 Wyoming; read the two together. In Wyoming's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii. In Wyoming, 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 Wyoming exactly as the source agency releases them.
In Wyoming, 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 Wyoming, it is Black Wyoming measured against all of Wyoming. In Wyoming, 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.
Cheyenne holds the largest share — the capital's Black population in the range of 3,000 to 3,500 in combination counts, a few percent of the city, centered historically on the west side near the base and now dispersed — sustained by F.E. Warren's missile-wing workforce and state government. Casper, the oil city, holds the second community, in the low thousands in combination counts, its size breathing with the energy cycle. The university at Laramie, the community colleges, and the remaining division towns hold hundreds each. The reservation counties (Fremont, around the Wind River Reservation) and the ranch counties record Black populations in the dozens — county tables in which the entire Black population fits in a school gymnasium, the extreme end of the small-population discipline this section applies to Montana and the Dakotas.
Wyoming's Black population has a barometer no other state's shares quite so directly: the energy economy. The coal, oil, and trona booms of the 1970s and the shale era drew Black workers to the Casper, Gillette, and Rock Springs fields in numbers visible in those decades' censuses, and each bust returned a fraction of them to the metros of Colorado and Utah — a boom-bust signature recorded in the county tables of the Powder River and Green River basins, where Black counts rise and fall with the rig count more faithfully than with any other variable in the state's data.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 2.1% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 12,000 |
| 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.