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Camden, New Jersey

Camden, the city across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, is about 42 percent Black — some 30,200 Black residents, the second great population of a small, hard-presse

Camden is a city of about 71,800 people on the New Jersey bank of the Delaware River, directly across from Philadelphia — and about 42 percent of its residents are Black, a population of roughly 30,200 people that is among the largest Black communities of any small city in the Northeast. Camden was an industrial city of shipyards, factories, and the original Campbell's soup works, and its Black population grew with the Great Migration into a city that has since passed through one of the most severe urban declines in America. Its Black community — rooted, institutionally dense, and now joined by a large Latino population — remains one of the city's two great peoples. This article profiles Camden's Black population in the census data.

Civic Snapshot

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

The Record

The 2020 census counted roughly 30,200 Black residents in Camden, about 42 percent of the city, alongside a Latino population of about 55 percent — making Camden one of the few American cities where Black and Latino communities together form essentially the whole population, each with deep local roots. The city's total has fallen from a mid-century peak near 125,000, and its Black population peaked in absolute terms in the late twentieth century; the share has held in the low forties as the Latino community grew faster. Camden County around the city is about 20 percent Black, and the near suburbs — including majority-Black Lawnside, one of the oldest incorporated Black communities in the North, founded by abolitionists in the nineteenth century — extend the community beyond the city line. Camden's Black population is thus both an inner-city population and the center of a wider South Jersey Black geography.

Black Camden was built by industry. The New York Shipbuilding yard in South Camden employed thousands through two world wars; Campbell Soup, founded in Camden in 1869, and RCA's Victor works across the river's neighborhoods made the city a manufacturing center that drew Black Southerners north in both waves of the Great Migration. They built the city's Black institutions: churches like those along Kaighn Avenue, a Black business class, and a civic tradition that produced some of New Jersey's earliest Black officeholders — Camden was electing Black council members generations before most Northern cities. When the shipyard closed in the 1960s and the factories followed, the jobs left and the people stayed: the census's Camden is the inheritor of that asymmetry, a Black community of industrial depth whose economy was removed around it, and whose neighborhoods — North Camden, Whitman Park, Parkside — carry both the strain and the institutional memory of the industrial city.

Institutions

Black Camden, New Jersey's congregations, schools, businesses, and civic organizations belong to the New Jersey story this gazetteer tells place by place. This page holds the frame for Camden, New Jersey: the count, the share, and the record, each on its cited source.