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Natchez, Mississippi

Natchez, the Adams County seat and the oldest permanent European settlement on the Mississippi River, is about 65 percent Black, with one of the deepest Black histories i

Natchez is a city of about 14,200 people on the high bluffs of the Mississippi River in Adams County — the oldest permanent European settlement on the river, founded by the French in 1716 — and about 65 percent of its residents are Black. In the decades before the Civil War, Natchez held one of the largest concentrations of enslaved people in the United States, and its Forks of the Road was among the largest slave markets in the South; the Black community that endured there, enslaved and free, built one of the deepest Black histories of any small city in America. Today Natchez's Black majority sustains that history — in its churches, its historic sites, and its civic life. This article profiles the city'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 Natchez city, Mississippi

The Record

The 2020 census counted roughly 9,200 Black residents in Natchez, about 65 percent of the city, in an Adams County that is about 56 percent Black. The city's total population has declined from above 20,000 in the late twentieth century, following the contraction of its manufacturing base, but its Black majority has been a constant: Natchez was a majority-Black place in the slave era, in the sharecropping era, and in the present. The city's Black population includes one of the South's most historically distinguished communities — descendants of the free people of color who, before emancipation, formed a small propertied class in Natchez, of whom William Johnson, the diarist known as the Barber of Natchez, is the best documented. That lineage — a Black community with free and enslaved branches documented in unusual depth — gives Natchez's demography a recorded texture few cities can match.

The demographic weight of Black Natchez was set by the cotton kingdom at its richest. In the 1850s the Natchez district's plantations produced immense fortunes, and the Forks of the Road market, just outside the city, was one of the largest sites of the domestic slave trade in the United States — the place where thousands of people brought down the river from the upper South were sold into the cotton fields of Mississippi and Louisiana. The city's celebrated antebellum mansions, which anchor its tourism today, stand on that foundation, and Natchez's public history has increasingly reckoned with the fact: the Forks of the Road site is now interpreted as a place of memory, and the city's Black heritage — its churches, its Rhythm Night Club memorial, the home of Richard Wright, who spent part of his boyhood in Natchez — is presented as central to the city's story. The Black population of the census is the descendant community of that world: the people who were traded at the Forks, worked the district's plantations, and built, after freedom, the institutions — schools, congregations, businesses — that still structure Black Natchez.

Institutions

The institutions of Black Natchez, Mississippi — its congregations, schools, businesses, and civic organizations — stand within the Mississippi frame this gazetteer builds state by state and county by county. This entry fixes Natchez, Mississippi itself in that frame: its count, its share, and its record, on the cited figures above.