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Cleveland County, North Carolina

20,159 Black residents · 20.3% of the county · ranked 27 of 100 in North Carolina by Black population

In Cleveland County, North Carolina, the 2020 Census counted 99,519 people, 20,159 of them Black alone. At 20.3%, Cleveland County's Black share stands against the state's 20.5% — the comparison this entry is built around.

Black share of state population — North Carolina highlighted — the state in the national tile map, shaded by the Black share of each state's population. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census (PL 94-171), Table P1.

Civic Snapshot

Measure	Figure
Total population, 2020	99,519
Black residents (alone), 2020	20,159
Black share of the county, 2020	20.3%
Rank by Black population among North Carolina counties	27 of 100

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Redistricting File (Public Law 94-171), Table P1 (race). Trend: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census Redistricting File (Public Law 94-171), Table P1.

Population Trend

In 2010 Cleveland County counted 20,332 Black residents; in 2020 it counted 20,159. The population declined by 0.9% across the decade, and the Black share in Cleveland County moved from 20.7% to 20.3%.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Redistricting File (Public Law 94-171), Table P1 (race). Trend: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census Redistricting File (Public Law 94-171), Table P1.

The Record

Within North Carolina, the Census Bureau counts 100 counties and county equivalents, Cleveland County among them; it stands 27 by Black population, with 20,159 Black residents of the state's 2.1 million. The gazetteer takes the county as its middle geography — the frame between the state page and the place pages — and prints the redistricting counts of Cleveland County, North Carolina, exactly as published.

Institutions

The institutions of Black Cleveland County, North Carolina, are recorded in this gazetteer through its place entries — the towns and communities inside the county's borders, each entered on its own published count. Read with those entries, the Cleveland County page gives the frame they stand in: 99,519 residents in all, 20,159 of them Black, and the county's direction across the last two censuses.