Year after year, census reports have warned that Boston’s Black population is fleeing, sparking concerns among policymakers and business leaders about the loss of so much Black talent and culture from Massachusetts.
But a new report set to be released Thursday suggests that the picture is more nuanced, and that the Black population is in fact increasing across the region, and is more diverse than policymakers may realize.
The 55-page report, “Great Migration to Global Immigration: A Portrait of Black Boston,” examines the ever-changing makeup of Boston’s Black community, and it shows that more Black people of different birthplaces, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status are calling Greater Boston home.
The report’s researchers say their findings differ from past studies, specifically those that found a net loss of Black residents in Boston, because those reports largely recognize only people who identify as Black only. The new report also includes Afro Latinos who might select both Black and Latino or Hispanic origins on federal census questionnaires, as well as people who choose Black in combination with other racial or ethnic groups.
The researchers say all people who identify as Black, including Black Latinos and those who also identify with other races and ethnicities, should be counted to truly understand the growth of the community and culture.
“Those data distinctions can make the difference between telling a story of a Black population decline or a Black population increase,” said Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators, who coauthored the report in partnership with the Boston Foundation and Embrace Boston. The report is slated to be presented at an event at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Roxbury Community College Media Arts Center.
The findings, researchers say, should challenge public officials and policymakers to take a more intersectional, culturally competent approach to addressing the many problems afflicting Black people in Greater Boston.
“There’re so many questions and issues and implications for how we study the Black community and race in Massachusetts,” said James Jennings, professor emeritus of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, and coauthor of the report.
He added, “People have been making policy and all kinds of decisions without really acknowledging or understanding how the Black population has changed. . . . There are some political implications that might unfold as we get a sense of what this data means down the road.”
Boston’s Black population has come a long way from its beginnings as a small mix of freedmen and enslaved residents, the report says. During the first half of the 20th century, Black families fleeing Jim Crow during the Great Migration and others leaving the West Indies for better opportunity settled in Boston neighborhoods such as Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End.
In the last several decades, though, Boston’s Black residents have migrated to suburbs south of the city such as Brockton, Randolph, and Stoughton. More recently, many have also relocated to communities north of Boston such as Lynn, Lowell, and Lawrence.
In 1980, more than three-quarters of Greater Boston’s Black population lived within Boston city limits. That number dropped to 36 percent in 2020, and 64 percent of Black residents in the area now live in the suburbs, the report stated, citing census figures.
Many of the people driving the growth in the Black population identify as Afro Latinos, multiracial, and multiethnic, the report found.
“The Black population has always reflected diversity, but not to the degree that we found while looking at these high numbers,” Jennings said. When it comes to Greater Boston’s Afro Latinos, “I don’t think I’m being too melodramatic in saying explosive growth.”
The largest decrease in Black residents in Boston occurred in parts of Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and the South End; Black populations dropped more than 7 percentage points in each of those neighborhoods between 2010 and 2020. Meanwhile, the share of Black people in other neighborhoods like Hyde Park rose at least 6 percentage points.
The report’s coauthors agree that the growth of Greater Boston’s Black demographic is fueled by global and local phenomena, as well as changes to the decennial census. Since 2000, the Census Bureau has allowed people to choose more than one race. For 2010 and 2020, residents also had the choice to write in their own identification if they believe their ethnicity doesn’t fit into the available categories.
“How the census counts people matters,” Jennings said. “Because we see how when we dig deeper into what the Black population is, we get more accurate numbers.”
The report also compares Boston’s Black migration patterns to trends at the national level. At more than 37 percent, the Boston metropolitan area in 2020 had the country’s largest percentage of foreign-born Black residents, surpassing Miami, Minneapolis, and New York. And while 11 percent of Black Americans across the country identify as foreign-born, those figures jump to 40 percent in Greater Boston.
The data also challenges widespread assumptions about Black Bostonians’ average net worth, including the often-discussed Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report that in 2015 concluded Black Boston families have an average net worth of $8, compared to $247,500 for white families.
Instead of net worth calculations, the new report uses median household income to measure the racial wealth gap, and shows wide wealth disparities within Greater Boston’s Black communities. Nigerian households have a median household income of just under $80,000, while Dominican and Puerto Rican families make around $40,000. Greater Boston’s Salvadoran, Trinidadian and Tobagonian, Haitian, Jamaican, and African families have household incomes between $60,000 and $70,000. Incomes for African American and Cape Verdean families hover just above $50,000.
“The Black community is not monolithic,” Jennings said.
Jennings and Schuster agree that the data can’t answer every question about how to tackle the disparities afflicting Greater Boston’s Black residents. For Schuster, he’d like to see more nuanced data to understand “how much of this trend means there’s a growing Black middle class cluster in a way that our region hasn’t had before . . . versus how much of this is a frustrating story of displacement from the urban core in the city.”
Nevertheless, he said, the data that is cited in the report can help local leaders chart a path forward that doesn’t leave Black Boston’s cosmopolitan makeup behind.
Tiana Woodard can be reached at tiana.woodard@globe.com. Follow her @tianarochon.