United States › Louisiana

Louisiana

The state entry: 1.5 million Black residents, 31.4% of the state, in the published 2020 count.

Louisiana holds about 1.55 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in three of its people, with Black alone at about 1.46 million, or 31 percent. Only Mississippi records a higher Black share among the states, and no state's Black culture is more distinctly its own: Louisiana's Black population descends from French and Spanish colonial foundations, from a famous free people of color class in New Orleans, from the sugar parishes' brutal plantation economy, and from West African traditions preserved with unusual depth. 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 Louisiana grew from 1,452,396 to 1,464,023 (+0.8%), and its share of the whole moved from 32.0% to 31.4%.

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

The state's Black geography divides into three regions. In the south, New Orleans and the river parishes — the old sugar country between the city and Baton Rouge — hold the historic core, where plantation parishes such as St. John the Baptist, St. Charles, and Iberville record Black shares at or above the state figure amid the chemical-industry corridor. Acadiana, the Cajun country of the southwest centered on Lafayette, holds a large Black population that shares the region's French language and Catholic culture — the Creole country whose music, zydeco, is the Black French tradition's gift. In the north, the cotton parishes of the Delta fringe — East Carroll, Madison, and Tensas among them — record Black majorities and the state's hardest economic data, in the Mississippi Delta's southern extension; Shreveport and Monroe anchor the region's cities, both with Black shares around or above half within their limits.

Institutions

For the institutions of Black Louisiana, read downward: the gazetteer carries them in its county and place entries, place by place. This page frames the whole — 1.5 million Black residents, 64 counties and county equivalents, 488 incorporated and census-designated places, all in the published counts.