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Kentucky

The state entry: 362,417 Black residents, 8.0% of the state, in the published 2020 count.

Kentucky holds about 420,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in ten of its people, with Black alone at about 361,000, or 8 percent. Kentucky was the border state that held slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment ended it — it never seceded, and its enslaved population was emancipated by constitutional amendment rather than proclamation — and its Black geography reflects that in-between history: a substantial old population in the Bluegrass and the Louisville falls city, thin settlement in the mountain east. This article profiles the population in the census data.

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 Kentucky grew from 337,520 to 362,417 (+7.4%), and its share of the whole moved from 7.8% to 8.0%.

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

Louisville and its Jefferson County hold roughly a third of all Black Kentuckians — about 140,000 people, more than a fifth of the consolidated city-county — and the community reaches to the city's founding, built by enslaved and free Black labor on the Ohio River's falls portage. West Louisville, the historic Black district of neighborhoods like Russell, Parkland, and Shawnee, remains majority Black and holds the community's institutions, while the modern population spreads through the south and east county suburbs and across the river into southern Indiana's New Albany and Jeffersonville. Louisville's Black professional infrastructure — Simmons College of Kentucky, the state's small private HBCU; the Louisville Urban League tradition; a large hospital and logistics workforce (the UPS Worldport hub is among the region's largest employers) — makes it one of the Ohio Valley's significant Black metros, a profile continued in the cities section's river-city coverage.

Institutions

For the institutions of Black Kentucky, read downward: the gazetteer carries them in its county and place entries, place by place. This page frames the whole — 362,417 Black residents, 120 counties and county equivalents, 555 incorporated and census-designated places, all in the published counts.