This year marks the 100th anniversary of Black History Month, and while celebrations and commemorations are underway in Boston and beyond, the Black population in the city has continued to shrink since the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest census survey estimates show.
Other groups have remained mostly steady, but the multiracial population has grown.
The trends in the most recent American Community Survey five-year estimates reflect a longstanding pattern of a declining number of Black residents in Boston while communities south of Boston see growth, said Luc Schuster, executive director of Boston Indicators, the research center of The Boston Foundation.
“I think the real story is the massive growth [in the number of Black residents] south of Boston, and that’s looked like it’s continued,” he said.
The map above shows how the Black population, including multiracial Black residents, has changed across Massachusetts communities.
The Globe’s analysis of the data focuses on residents who identify as Black alone or in combination with another race or ethnicity, reflecting the growth of multiracial Black residents. The number of Massachusetts residents identifying as Black alone has declined in recent years, but more residents who identify as Black also identify as Hispanic or another race.
The latest estimates provide a glimpse into what life was like in American communities over a five-year period from 2020 to 2024, offering the first town-by-town look at how the makeup of our communities has changed since the five years before COVID-19, 2015 to 2019.
All three of the communities with the largest shares of Black residents in the 2024 estimates were south of Boston: Brockton, where 51 percent of residents identify as Black or multiracial; Randolph with 46 percent: and Avon with 32. The three communities have also seen overall population growth.
Meanwhile, some of the suburbs north of Boston, such as Chelsea, Malden, and Medford, saw declines in the share of residents who are Black or multiracial Black. Chelsea’s share fell by 6.6 percentage points relative to the average from 2015 to 2019, while Malden’s share fell by 3.4 points, and Medford by 2.9.
Rising housing costs in Boston and its northern suburbs have pushed many Black residents toward more affordable areas south of the city, Schuster said.
“A lot of the story in especially Brockton is Black first-time home buyers,” he said.
He added that newly organized Black churches and other community institutions have anchored and reinforced Black population growth in some of those areas in recent years.
See the data for your community:
Scooty Nickerson can be reached at scooty.nickerson@globe.com. Daigo Fujiwara-Smith can be reached at daigo.fujiwara@globe.com. Follow him @DaigoFuji.