Residence and Region

• In 2000, 88% of the 34.7 million African Americans in the United States resided in metropolitan areas and 53.1% lived inside central cities (i.e., the urban core). This was higher than the proportion of whites (77.4%) who reside in metropolitan areas, and nearly 2.5 times the percentage of whites (22%) who lived inside central cities. The majority of whites (56.2%) instead lived outside the central cities, in the suburbs of metropolitan areas. In contrast, 34.9% of African Americans lived in suburbs, a 29.3% increase from the percentage of blacks (almost 27%) who resided in suburbs in 1990.

• More than half (54%) of African Americans resided in the South in 2000. The Northeast and Midwest were each home to about 19% of the black population in 2000, and the West to about 10%.
  

• In 2000, about 79% of blacks in the South and almost all blacks outside of the South (98%) resided in metropolitan areas. The 3.9 million blacks who lived in non-metropolitan areas of the South represented 20.4% of the southern black population, but they represented 92.5% of all blacks in the United States who lived in non-metropolitan areas. The percentage of whites living in non-metropolitan areas was also higher in the South (27%) than outside of it (21% in the Northeast and Midwest and 15.4% in the West), but the regional differentials in non-metropolitan residents were more striking for blacks (20.4% vs 1.9% in the Northeast and Midwest and .002% in the West).

• In 2000, about 60% of the black population resided in the 10 metropolitan areas graphed above. Some of these areas included the counties with the largest black populations: Cook County (Chicago), IL, (1.4 million); Los Angeles County, CA, (0 .9 million); Kings County (Brooklyn), NY (0.9 million); Wayne County (Detroit), MI (0.8 million); and Philadelphia County, PA (0.6 million).
  

• About three-fifths of blacks (58%) lived in one of the 10 largest cities listed on the graph above in 2000. Blacks were a majority of the total population in five of these cities: Detroit (81.6%), Washington, DC (61%), New Orleans (67.3%), Baltimore (64.3%), and Memphis (61.4%), and they were at least one quarter of the total population in the other five except for Los Angeles (11.2%). In 2000, The District of Columbia (Washington, DC) led all states or state equivalents with the largest percentage (61%) of African Americans in its total population.

• The 10 states with the largest African American populations in 2000 were New York (3.1 million), California (2.5 million), Texas (2.5 million), Florida (2.5 million), Georgia (2.4 million), Illinois (1.8 million), North Carolina (1.7 million), and Maryland, Louisiana and Michigan (1.4 million each). These were also the top 10 in 1990. In 2000, a majority of Washington, DC's population (61%) was African American, and six southern states had populations that were over 25% black: Mississippi (37%), Louisiana (33%), South Carolina (30%), Georgia (29%), Maryland (29%) and Alabama (26%).

References