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Petersburg, Virginia

Petersburg, the independent Virginia city on the Appomattox River, is about 74 percent Black — a community of some 24,600 Black residents beside Virginia State University

Petersburg is an independent city of about 33,200 people on the Appomattox River in south-central Virginia, twenty-five miles south of Richmond — and about 74 percent of its residents are Black, one of the highest shares of any city in Virginia. Petersburg's Black community is among the oldest urban Black communities in the United States: free Black families were established there before the Revolution, and the city became a center of free Black life in the slave South. Virginia State University, the historically Black land-grant university founded in 1882, stands in neighboring Ettrick as the community's anchor institution. This article profiles Petersburg's Black population in the census data: its size, its exceptional historical depth, and its present economy.

Civic Snapshot

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

The Record

The 2020 census counted roughly 24,600 Black residents in Petersburg, a share of about 74 percent. The city sits inside the Richmond metropolitan area, whose Black population exceeds 400,000, but Petersburg's concentration is distinct from the capital's: where Richmond is about 40 percent Black, Petersburg's three-quarters majority reflects its own particular history — a tobacco and manufacturing city whose white population suburbanized into Chesterfield and Dinwiddie counties while its Black community remained. The city's total population fell sharply in the late twentieth century, from above 40,000 to near 30,000, and has recovered modestly since; through the whole cycle the Black population has been the city's stable core, the community that held its neighborhoods, churches, and institutions together across the downturn.

The roots of Black Petersburg run to the colonial period. Free Black residents were recorded in the area from the eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century Petersburg held one of the largest free Black populations in the South — artisans, tobacco workers, watermen, and tradespeople, worshipping at churches like Gillfield Baptist, founded in the 1780s and among the oldest Black congregations in America. Pocahontas Island, the city's river neighborhood settled by free Black families in the 1730s and among the oldest continuously inhabited free Black communities in the nation, remains a living neighborhood and a National Register district. Enslaved Petersburgers worked the tobacco warehouses of the Appomattox; after emancipation the community built schools and businesses, and in 1882 the state founded Virginia State University just across the line in Ettrick — the first fully state-supported four-year institution for Black students in the United States. The census's 74 percent is thus the modern measure of a community with nearly three centuries of continuous urban presence.

Institutions

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