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Orange County, North Carolina

15,848 Black residents · 10.7% of the county · ranked 33 of 100 in North Carolina by Black population

Orange County is a North Carolina county entry in the gazetteer's first edition. In the 2020 Census, Orange County held 148,696 residents in all, of whom 15,848 — 10.7% — were Black alone, the count this gazetteer records for every place on the same terms.

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	148,696
Black residents (alone), 2020	15,848
Black share of the county, 2020	10.7%
Rank by Black population among North Carolina counties	33 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

The two-census record for Orange County: 15,928 Black residents in 2010 and 15,848 in 2020. The population declined by 0.5%, and the Black share in Orange County moved from 11.9% to 10.7%.

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

Orange County is one of 100 counties and county equivalents the Census Bureau counts in North Carolina. Together they hold the state's 2.1 million Black residents, and Orange County's 15,848 of them give it rank 33 of 100 in that order. The county is the gazetteer's middle geography — larger than the places inside it, smaller than the state frame — and the figures printed here for Orange County are the published redistricting counts, reproduced as released.

Institutions

The institutions of Black Orange 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 Orange County page gives the frame they stand in: 148,696 residents in all, 15,848 of them Black, and the county's direction across the last two censuses.