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Delaware

The state entry: 218,899 Black residents, 22.1% of the state, in the published 2020 count.

Delaware holds about 245,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly a quarter of the First State's people, with Black alone at about 218,000, or 22 percent. It is the highest Black share of any state outside the Deep South's core, in a state small enough that its Black population and its largest city are nearly the same subject. Wilmington anchors the north; Dover, the capital, is the second center; and Delaware State University gives the state an HBCU anchor its size would not predict. This article profiles the population.

Civic Snapshot

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

Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the Black population of Delaware grew from 191,814 to 218,899 (+14.1%), and its share of the whole moved from 21.4% to 22.1%.

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

Wilmington, the state's largest city at about 71,000, is majority Black — roughly 56 to 58 percent in the modern counts — a corporate and banking city whose residential data invert its office towers' prosperity. The historic community centers on the East Side and the districts around it; the modern population spreads through the city's neighborhoods and into New Castle County's suburbs (Bear, New Castle, Middletown's boom districts), which hold the county's growth. New Castle County overall is roughly a quarter to three-tenths Black. The city's data carry the small-state version of the urban file: banking and incorporation wealth headquartered in its downtown beside neighborhood poverty rates among the region's most difficult, and a school-governance history — the metropolitan desegregation case that merged city and suburban districts for a generation — that remains the state's defining education chapter.

Institutions

Black Delaware's institutions — congregations, schools, businesses, civic organizations — are recorded in this gazetteer where they stand: in the county and place entries beneath this page. The state page is the frame around them, holding 218,899 Black residents across 3 counties and county equivalents and 79 places in the published counts.