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Bessemer, Alabama

Bessemer, the old steel city southwest of Birmingham, is about 76 percent Black, with a working-class industrial heritage and a median household income near $38,000.

Bessemer is a city of about 25,500 people in Jefferson County, Alabama, some fifteen miles southwest of downtown Birmingham — and about 76 percent of its residents are Black, making it one of the largest majority-Black cities in the Birmingham metropolitan area. Bessemer was founded in the 1880s as a purpose-built industrial town in the iron-and-steel district that made Birmingham the steel capital of the South, and its demography was forged in the mill villages, ore mines, and rail yards of that economy. When the heavy industry contracted in the late twentieth century, the city that remained was working-class, substantially Black, and tightly bound to the fortunes of the wider Birmingham region. This article profiles Bessemer's Black population in the census data: its size, its industrial roots, and its present economic standing.

Civic Snapshot

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Bessemer city, Alabama

The Record

The 2020 census counted roughly 19,400 Black residents in Bessemer, a share of about 76 percent that has risen steadily over recent decades as the city's white population declined and its Black population held comparatively steady. Bessemer's Black majority is a metropolitan fact as much as a municipal one: it anchors the southwestern side of a Birmingham metro whose core city is itself about 69 percent Black, and its neighborhoods grade into the majority-Black communities of Brighton, Lipscomb, and Midfield along the old industrial corridor. The city's population peaked in the steel era and has fallen gradually since — from above 33,000 in the late twentieth century to about 25,500 today — but the Black population's absolute size has declined far less than the total, which is precisely why the share has climbed.

Bessemer exists because of what lay under the hills around it: iron ore, coal, and limestone in close proximity, the three ingredients of steel. The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company and its successor interests built furnaces and mills across the district, and Black workers — first recruited from Alabama's farm counties, then arriving in the industrial migration out of the Black Belt — formed a large share of that workforce from the beginning. Company housing, Black churches, and fraternal institutions grew up around the plants, and Bessemer developed the dense institutional life of a Black steel town: its own Black business districts, its own congregations, and a union-era tradition in which Black mill workers were central. The collapse of Southern steel employment in the 1970s and 1980s removed the economic engine without removing the community, and the Bessemer of the census today is the inheritor of that history — a city whose Black majority was built by industrial labor.

Institutions

For Black Bessemer, Alabama, institutions are carried at the city's own scale — congregations, schools, businesses, and civic bodies — and the gazetteer sets them within the Alabama frame above this entry. The entry's work is the fixing of Bessemer, Alabama: its people, its share, and its cited record.