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Missouri

The state entry: 699,840 Black residents, 11.4% of the state, in the published 2020 count.

Missouri holds about 785,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in eight of its people, with Black alone at about 700,000, or 11 percent. Missouri entered the Union as a slave state under the Compromise that bears its name, and its Black population has always been a tale of two cities: St. Louis on the Mississippi, one of the great Black metropolises of the migration era, and Kansas City on the Missouri, the jazz-age center of the plains. Together they hold the large majority of Black Missouri; between them lies a state where Black settlement thins to the river counties of the Bootheel. 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 Missouri grew from 693,391 to 699,840 (+0.9%), and its share of the whole moved from 11.6% to 11.4%.

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 St. Louis region holds Missouri's largest Black population: the independent City of St. Louis is more than two-fifths Black — about 130,000 people within a city of 300,000 — and the metropolitan total, reaching across the river to East St. Louis and the Illinois shore profiled in that state's account, exceeds half a million. The city's Black community is among the migration era's foundational: steamboat and rail labor, then the stockyards and factories, built neighborhoods from the Ville — the historic center of Black education and professional life, home to Sumner High School, the first Black high school west of the Mississippi — to the north side's vast districts. The modern data record the familiar contraction: the city's population has fallen by more than half from its 1950 peak, its Black population suburbanizing into St. Louis County's north municipalities (Ferguson, Florissant, Hazelwood, and University City among them) at every income level.

Institutions

Black Missouri'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 699,840 Black residents across 115 counties and county equivalents and 1082 places in the published counts.