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West Virginia

The state entry: 65,813 Black residents, 3.7% of the state, in the published 2020 count.

West Virginia holds about 90,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twenty of its people, with Black alone at about 64,000, or 3.6 percent. It is one of the smallest Black state populations in this reference, and one of the oldest in continuous record: a community built in the salt and railroad towns of the Kanawha Valley and the coal camps of the southern fields, where Black miners were a pillar of the industry's workforce and its union. This article profiles the population in the census data.

Civic Snapshot

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Redistricting File (Public Law 94-171), Table P1 (race). Trend: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census Redistricting File (Public Law 94-171), Table P1.

Population Trend

Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the Black population of West Virginia grew from 63,124 to 65,813 (+4.3%), and its share of the whole moved from 3.4% to 3.7%.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census Redistricting File (Public Law 94-171), Table P1 (race). Trend: U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 Census Redistricting File (Public Law 94-171), Table P1.

The Record

Charleston, the capital, is the largest center: the city is roughly a sixth Black within its 48,000 residents, its community centered on the West Side and the blocks around the old Garnet school district, with the Kanawha Valley's chemical-plant towns (South Charleston, Dunbar — roughly a fifth Black, Institute — the village built around West Virginia State) adjoining. Huntington, the river city, is roughly a tenth Black. The southern coalfields hold the historic layer: McDowell County — once the state's most populous county and a center of Black mining life, with towns like Keystone and Kimball (whose war memorial to Black veterans of the First World War is the nation's first) — recorded Black shares in the range of a fifth to a quarter at the industry's peak and still records the state's highest county shares at a fraction of the population. The Eastern Panhandle (Martinsburg, growing in Washington's exurban reach) is the state's growth pole for every group; the northern panhandle and the Allegheny counties record small communities in the low single digits.

Institutions

Black West Virginia's institutions — congregations, schools, businesses, civic organizations — are recorded in this gazetteer where they stand: in the county and place entries beneath this page. The state page is the frame around them, holding 65,813 Black residents across 55 counties and county equivalents and 439 places in the published counts.