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Selma, Alabama
Selma, the Dallas County seat in Alabama's Black Belt, is about 82 percent Black — one of the highest shares of any city in America — with a Black civic tradition known w
Selma, the seat of Dallas County in west-central Alabama, is a city of about 17,800 people, roughly 82 percent of them Black — one of the highest Black population shares of any incorporated city in the United States. Selma sits in the heart of the Black Belt, the crescent of dark-soil counties across Alabama and Mississippi whose plantation-era agriculture bound a large enslaved population to the land and whose descendant communities remain majority Black today. Few American cities are better known: the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, and the confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, made this small city a permanent landmark of the nation's civic history. This article profiles Selma's Black population in the census record: its size, its county setting, and its economic profile.
Civic Snapshot
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| median household income | $30,000 |
| of residents live below the poverty line | 31% |
| of Selma's residents are Black | 82% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Demographic Profile (DP1) and ACS 2019–2023 5-year estimates for Selma city, Alabama
The Record
The 2020 census counted about 14,600 Black residents in Selma, against a total population just under 18,000 that has been slowly declining for decades as younger residents leave for Montgomery, Birmingham, and the metropolitan South. The Black share — about 82 percent — places Selma in a small class of American cities where Black residents form not a plurality but an overwhelming majority, alongside places like East St. Louis and Prichard. Dallas County around the city tells the same story at county scale: roughly 69 percent Black, one of the highest county shares in Alabama. The Black population of Selma is also notably rooted: a large fraction of its families trace their presence in Dallas County back generations, through the sharecropping era that followed emancipation and into the present.
Selma's demography cannot be separated from the Black Belt itself. The region's rich prairie soil made it the center of Alabama's cotton economy in the nineteenth century, and the labor system built on that soil concentrated enslaved African Americans in counties like Dallas at densities unmatched elsewhere in the state. After emancipation, the Black majority stayed — working the same land as tenant farmers and sharecroppers, building churches, schools, and businesses in Selma's streets, and sustaining a civic infrastructure that would later carry a movement. The Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 grew directly out of that infrastructure: the teachers, students, and church congregations of a majority-Black city organizing in their own community. The Edmund Pettus Bridge, a steel through-arch structure over the Alabama River on U.S. Route 80, remains the movement's most recognized physical landmark, and Selma's Black heritage draws visitors from around the world to a city of fewer than 20,000 people.
Institutions
Black Selma, Alabama's congregations, schools, businesses, and civic organizations belong to the Alabama story this gazetteer tells place by place. This page holds the frame for Selma, Alabama: the count, the share, and the record, each on its cited source.