ChicTrib

Black population here No. 2 in nation

August 13, 2001

BY JANET RAUSA FULLER STAFF REPORTER

Chicago has the second-highest black population and the third-highest white population of any U.S. city, two new Census Bureau reports show.

But that comes as no surprise considering its size and reputation as a melting pot, observers say.

"The good news is that as we've become an increasingly global world, Chicago embodies much of what it means to be a global city," said David Perry, director of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, "But, [Chicago] also has its own history of disparities that diversity brings, that it has yet to overcome."

The reports, to be released today, look at national and regional growth and distribution patterns of blacks and whites.

Second only to New York, a city 2.3 million blacks call home, Chicago has 1.1 million African Americans, or about 37 percent of the city's population, according to the black population report. That share is down slightly from a decade ago, when blacks made up 39 percent of the population in Chicago.

Denver, Philadelphia and Houston rank next, respectively, with black populations numbering between 500,000 and 1 million.

Nationwide, the number of blacks is growing at a faster rate than the population as a whole.

Between 1990 and 2000, the black population went up 21.5 percent to 36.4 million, while total population grew 13.2 percent to 281.4 million.

That difference in growth is to be expected, "to the extent that the black population is a younger population and child-bearing rates among blacks are higher," said Jesse McKinnon, the Census Bureau demographer who wrote the black population report.

For the first time in census history, people were allowed to identify themselves by more than one race. The figures, therefore, account for those who consider themselves strictly black, strictly white or a mix of black, white and other races.

"It makes things more complex but also more interesting, and it says a lot about us as a nation," said demographer Elizabeth Grieco, who wrote the white population report.

Despite a more diverse American landscape, whites remain the racial majority, accounting for 77 percent of the total population, the report shows.

And with the exception of Hawaii, where the population is largely Asian, whites are the majority in every state.

In Chicago, 44 percent of the population, or about 1.3 million people, are white, compared with 1.9 million in Los Angeles and 3.8 million in New York.

Though the white population is growing more slowly than other groups, up only 8.6 percent from 1990 compared with 21.5 percent among blacks and 58 percent among Hispanics, "It grew more, numerically speaking, because it had a much larger base population," Grieco said.

More surprising, she says, is how whites are dispersed throughout the nation.

More than half of the nation's 217 million whites live in just 10 states--Illinois, California, Texas, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina.

The Midwest has the largest concentration of whites--85 percent.

Blacks, on the other hand, are in greatest numbers and proportions in the South, which the Census considers a 17-state region.

Fifty-four percent of the nation's 36 million blacks live in the South. Out of 96 counties where blacks make up at least 50 percent of the total population, 95 are located in the South.

There are exceptions closer to home.

Among cities with at least 100,000 people, Gary, Ind. boasts the highest concentration of blacks at 85 percent, edging out even Detroit, where 83 percent of the population is black.

That comes as no shock to Gary native Venus Cobb, who is director of the Empowerment Zone, a federally funded economic development program linking the black communities in Gary, Hammond and East Chicago.

Cobb, who moved back to Gary last year from Denver, says efforts to capitalize on the area's racial makeup have been ongoing since the mid-1990s.

"This area has for a long time been rooted in a strong sense of family tradition and culture," she said. "You still have the old generation that remains here, but also included are those--including myself--who moved away from the area for a time and are now coming back."

-- Anonymous, August 13, 2001