State Plates
Movement and Change: Black Wyoming
Populations move, and the census counts the result. This plate reads the movement record of Black Wyoming — the growth, the arrivals, and the departures written into the published counts for the state, whose Black population stands at 12,000, alone or in combination, 1 percent of the state on the alone count.
Growth and Migration
The composition is military-weighted like the other garrison states', with the rooted railroad-descendant families of Cheyenne and Laramie as its historic core and energy-boom arrivals as its variable layer. Institutions are statewide and few by arithmetic: Cheyenne's historic Black churches (the Second Baptist tradition of the west side), the state museum's Black heritage documentation, the University of Wyoming's Black studies and student organizations, and the NAACP's Wyoming presence carried from Cheyenne. The state's Black elected representation has been episodic in the legislative record — a function of arithmetic the profile states plainly.
At 12,000 people the survey estimates are indicative only, and this reference rests the profile on the counts: the decennial series shows the population growing in combination counts at rates above the state's, with the alone count's slower growth reflecting — as in Hawaii and Alaska — the rising multiracial identification of the youngest cohorts, a pattern visible in every small western state's tables. Incomes and attainment in the aggregate survey data sit near the national Black figures, the military and government shares cushioning the energy cycle that swings the state's overall numbers.
The National Movement Around the State
In Wyoming, 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. Wyoming, in the West, 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 Wyoming.
In Wyoming, movement is measured three ways in the federal record, and the plate distinguishes them. In Wyoming, 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 Wyoming. In Wyoming, 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 Wyoming, the published components separate the streams, and the balance among them is the state's movement signature.
The migration currents read locally in Wyoming, where the state rows below set the population whose movement the national pattern frames. 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. The table states Wyoming's record plainly; the general record matters only as it sharpens that statement.
For Wyoming, the national movement figures are the current; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is where the current lands. 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 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 general material becomes a specific place in the table below, in Wyoming's rows.
Reading This Plate
In Wyoming, 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 Wyoming; 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 Wyoming plate in this atlas stands on.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as Movement and Change: Black Wyoming. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 1%; Black share, alone or in combination: 2.1%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 12,000. For Wyoming, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
| 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.