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Sumter, South Carolina

Sumter, the seat of Sumter County in South Carolina's Midlands, is about 48 percent Black — some 20,900 Black residents in the city, in a county that is majority Black.

Sumter is a city of about 43,500 people, the seat of Sumter County in the Midlands of South Carolina — and about 48 percent of its residents are Black, a near-majority within the city limits and a clear majority when the surrounding county is counted. Sumter sits in the state's central Black belt of counties, where the plantation economy of the inner coastal plain left large Black populations across the countryside, and it serves as that region's principal city — its hospital, retail, and institutional center — alongside Shaw Air Force Base, one of the Air Force's oldest installations, just outside the city. This article profiles Sumter's Black population in the census data: its size, its county setting, and its economic standing.

Black share of state population — South Carolina highlighted — the state in the national tile map, shaded by the Black share of each state's population. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census (PL 94-171), Table P1.

Civic Snapshot

Measure	Figure
median household income	$45,000
of residents live below the poverty line	20%
of Sumter's residents are Black	48%

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

The Record

The 2020 census counted roughly 20,900 Black residents in Sumter, about 48 percent of the city. Sumter County as a whole is about 48 to 50 percent Black within a wider Midlands region — Clarendon, Lee, Williamsburg, and Sumter counties together — that ranks among the most heavily Black rural regions of the Atlantic South. The city's population has grown modestly over recent decades, buoyed by the military presence and its regional-center functions, which distinguishes Sumter from many Black-belt seats in this reference whose populations are falling. Its Black population spans both the old urban neighborhoods around the city's historic core and the growing subdivisions fed by the base and the hospital — an Air Force city's churn layered over one of South Carolina's oldest rooted Black communities.

Sumter's Black institutional life is anchored by Morris College, the historically Black college founded in 1908 by the Baptist Educational and Missionary Convention of South Carolina — a church-founded institution that has educated Black teachers, ministers, and professionals for the whole Midlands region for more than a century. Around it stands the infrastructure of a Black county seat: historic congregations, the campuses of the Sumter school district, and a Black business and professional community serving the multi-county region. The wider area's Black history is deep — Sumter County's plantations worked the rich soils of the inner plain, the High Hills of Santee sheltered one of the state's oldest planting communities, and the Black majority of the surrounding counties descends from that world. General Thomas Sumter's city thus sits, demographically, at the center of a Black countryside — the urban face of a region where Black South Carolinians have always been close to half or more of the people.

Institutions

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