10 States With The Largest African-American Populations

Here is a fact that surprises people: the states with the most Black residents by raw count, places like Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, and California, are mostly not the ones where African Americans make up the largest share of the population. This list is about share, the places where Black residents form the biggest slice of the community, and it runs almost entirely through the South, plus the nation's capital. The picture has also shifted since these numbers last made headlines. Using the 2020 Census, the rankings have reshuffled and several shares have dipped, while a century-old pattern has quietly reversed: after generations of leaving the South, Black Americans are increasingly moving back to it. Here are the ten states where African Americans make up the greatest share of the population, plus one honorable mention that would lead them all if it counted, with a bit of the history behind each.

Mississippi (37.9% Black)

No state has a higher Black population share than Mississippi, where nearly 38% of residents are African American, a direct legacy of the cotton plantations that made the Mississippi Delta one of the most heavily enslaved regions in the country. Mississippi also produced a genuine milestone: in 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate, representing the state during Reconstruction. That progress proved brutally short-lived. Within a generation, Jim Crow laws and violence had stripped away Black voting power across the state, and it took the civil rights movement nearly a century later to begin restoring it. Today Mississippi still holds a cluster of majority-Black counties in the Delta and remains one of the most important places in the country for understanding both the depth of American slavery and the long struggle against it.

Louisiana (33.1% Black)

About a third of Louisiana is Black, and nowhere is that presence more deeply woven into a state's identity. New Orleans gave the world jazz, and its most famous son, Louis Armstrong, was born into poverty in the city in 1901 before reshaping American music entirely. Louisiana's Black history reaches back to the enslaved people who worked its sugar and cotton plantations along the Mississippi River, and forward into the Creole culture of New Orleans and the Afro-Caribbean influences you can still hear in the city's brass bands and taste in its food. The state has its own firsts, too. Israel M. Augustine Jr. became Louisiana's first Black district judge in 1969-70, and in 1971 he presided over the high-profile New Orleans Black Panther trial that drew national attention.

Georgia (33.0% Black)

Georgia is the giant of this list in absolute terms. With around 3.5 million Black residents, it has one of the largest Black populations of any state, and they make up roughly a third of Georgia overall. Atlanta has been called the "Black Mecca" for good reason: it is the birthplace and final resting place of Martin Luther King Jr., a hub of historically Black colleges, and a magnet for Black professionals and entrepreneurs for decades. The roots are older and harder, though. Georgia's rice and cotton economy depended on enslaved West Africans, many from Africa's rice-growing regions, whose descendants built the Gullah-Geechee culture of the coast. It was in Atlanta, in 1895, that Booker T. Washington delivered his famous and controversial "Atlanta Compromise" speech, urging a gradualist path that other Black leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois chief among them, would forcefully reject.

Maryland (32.0% Black)

Maryland sits just behind at 32%, and its Black history carries one of the most famous names in the American story of freedom: Harriet Tubman, born enslaved in Dorchester County around 1822. After escaping to the North, Tubman returned again and again to guide other enslaved people out along the Underground Railroad, the secret network of safe houses and conductors that ran northward to freedom. Maryland is also home to some of the most prosperous majority-Black communities in the country, especially in Prince George's County outside Washington, long regarded as one of the wealthiest majority-Black counties in the United States. That prosperity sits alongside persistent gaps in income, incarceration, and access to good schools that Black Marylanders, like Black Americans nationwide, continue to push against.

Alabama (26.8% Black)

Alabama and South Carolina are now neck-and-neck at just under 27%, and Alabama's place in Black history towers over its size. This is where, in 1965, marchers led by Martin Luther King Jr. set out from Selma toward the capital in Montgomery to demand the right to vote, only to be beaten by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in scenes that horrified the nation and helped push the Voting Rights Act into law that same year. Montgomery is also where Rosa Parks had refused to give up her bus seat a decade earlier, sparking the boycott that first launched King to prominence. For a state its size, Alabama has produced a staggering roster of Black talent: Olympic legend Jesse Owens, home-run king Willie Mays, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and musician Nat King Cole, among many others.

South Carolina (26.8% Black)

South Carolina's Black history opens with one of the most striking acts of resistance in colonial America: the Stono Rebellion of September 9, 1739, the largest slave uprising in the colonies before the Revolution. Roughly 20 enslaved men gathered near the Stono River, raided a store for weapons, and fought their enslavers before the revolt was suppressed. The state was majority-Black for much of its history and is still home to the Gullah people of the Sea Islands, who preserved more of their West African language and culture than almost any community in the country. South Carolina also sent Tim Scott to Washington, the first Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. Its native sons and daughters include tennis pioneer Althea Gibson, the Godfather of Soul James Brown, and comedian Chris Rock.

Delaware (24.7% Black)

Delaware has quietly climbed this list, its Black share rising to nearly 25% as the small state has grown and diversified. The history runs long and complicated. The first documented African in the colony, a man recorded as Anthony, arrived in the 1630s, and Delaware's Dutch and later English settlers built it into a slaveholding colony. Yet Delaware was conflicted about the institution early: its 1776 constitution banned the importation of enslaved people from Africa, and a 1787 law penalized the trade further. Even so, the state clung to slavery longer than most, one of the last places where it remained legal right up until the 13th Amendment ended it in 1865. Delaware's notable Black figures include civil rights attorney Louis Redding, who helped dismantle school segregation, and Herman Holloway Sr., the first African American elected to the state senate.

North Carolina (22.5% Black)

North Carolina's Black population is large in number, around 2.4 million, even if its share sits below its Deep South neighbors. The state produced two of the most important enslaved memoirists in American letters, Harriet Jacobs and Thomas H. Jones, whose firsthand accounts forced the nation to confront what slavery actually was. It was also home to educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown, who founded the Palmer Memorial Institute in 1902 and ran it for decades, educating thousands of Black students. North Carolina set a major legal milestone, too: Henry Frye became the first African American to sit on the state Supreme Court in 1983, and in 1999 he became its first Black chief justice. The state's cultural exports are just as remarkable, including jazz pioneer Max Roach, singers Nina Simone and Ben E. King, and former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

Virginia (20.9% Black)

Virginia comes in at about 21%, and its Black history is arguably where the larger American story begins. In August 1619, the first enslaved Africans in England's mainland colonies were brought ashore at Point Comfort, in present-day Hampton, after being seized from a Portuguese slave ship. That arrival was long mythologized as a "Dutch ship," but historians now trace it to an English privateer. Slavery sank deep roots in Virginia's tobacco economy over the century that followed. The state later produced people who helped tear down the systems built there. Tennis great Arthur Ashe, raised in segregated Richmond, became the first Black man to win a Grand Slam singles title, and the city honors him with a statue on Monument Avenue, the same boulevard whose Confederate monuments were removed in 2020. It was also a Virginia bus arrest that led to Morgan v. Virginia, the 1946 Supreme Court ruling that struck down segregation on interstate buses, nearly a decade before Rosa Parks.

New York (17.5% Black)

Rounding out the ten is New York, where Black residents make up about 17.5% of the state, the overwhelming majority of them in and around New York City. NYC is home to the largest Black population of any city in the country, close to two million people as of 2020, and much of that presence traces to the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of Black Southerners moved north and turned neighborhoods like Harlem and Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant into cultural capitals of Black America. Harlem in particular gave rise to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, an outpouring of Black literature, music, and art whose influence still runs through American culture. New York has sent trailblazers to the national stage, too: Brooklyn's Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968 and, four years later, the first Black person to seek a major party's presidential nomination. And it was at Brooklyn's Ebbets Field in 1947 that Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier with the Dodgers.

Honorable Mention: District of Columbia (44.2% Black)

The District of Columbia is not a state, so it sits outside the ranking, but it would top the whole list by a wide margin if it qualified: about 44% of DC residents are Black, roughly 305,000 people. That share is still large, yet it tells a story of decline. As recently as 1980, Black residents made up more than 70% of the city, and DC was so central to Black political and cultural life that it picked up the affectionate nickname "Chocolate City." Since then the share has slipped steadily, to 50.7% in 2010 and to about 44% by 2020. The reasons will sound familiar to anyone who has watched a city gentrify: rising housing costs, uneven access to jobs and good schools, and the steady pull of the Maryland and Virginia suburbs, where many Black Washingtonians have relocated. The roots here run deep, though. Black men won the right to vote in DC in 1867, three years ahead of the 15th Amendment, and the city's federal workforce later helped anchor a thriving Black middle class.

A Map That Is Still Being Redrawn

For most of the 20th century, this map was emptying out. During the Great Migration, roughly six million Black Americans left the rural South for cities in the North and West, fleeing Jim Crow and chasing work and dignity. In recent decades that tide has turned. The New Great Migration is drawing Black Americans back toward the South, toward booming metros like Atlanta, Charlotte, Houston, and Dallas, pulled by jobs, lower costs, and family roots. The result is a Black America that remains concentrated in the South but is increasingly suburban and economically varied. The exact shares on this list will keep moving with every census, but the throughline holds: these are the places where African American history, culture, and community have been rooted longest, and where they continue to shape the life of the whole country.

Black Population Share By State (2020 Census)

All 50 states ranked by the share of residents who identified as Black or African American, alone or in combination with another race, in the 2020 Census, the most recent complete decennial count (the next is due in 2030). The District of Columbia would rank first at 44.2%, but it is a federal district, not a state.