Black residents

This measure shows the share of residents who are Black or African American. Like other race counts, it is based on how people identify themselves, and it reflects a diverse community that includes people with long U.S. roots as well as more recent immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere.

This share matters for understanding a community’s history and present. In the Charlotte region and across the South, where most Black Americans live, these patterns are tied to decades of housing, schooling, and economic policy. Tracking the share helps reveal where opportunity and investment have or have not reached.

The data also support fairness. They are used to enforce voting rights and fair-housing laws, to plan services, and to study segregation and equity.

In Charlotte, segregation has a specific, mappable shape often called the "crescent vs. wedge": an affluent, predominantly White wedge fanning southeast from uptown holds a large majority of the city’s wealth on under a quarter of its land, while a crescent of lower-income, majority-Black, Latino, and immigrant neighborhoods wraps the north, west, and east: a legacy of redlining, exclusionary single-family zoning, and interstate routing. Researchers identify segregation as one of the strongest correlates of low upward mobility, so a race-composition map here doubles as a map of where opportunity and investment have or haven’t reached. No share is good or bad on its own; the point is that the region’s institutions sorted opportunity along these lines.