Greater Boston’s Black population becoming more diverse, dispersed
By 
WHEN THE PRESIDENT of Cape Verde visited Massachusetts earlier this week, after meeting with Gov. Maura Healey at the State House, his big public appearance didn’t come in Boston but at Brockton High School, where President José Maria Neves got a rock star welcome when he spoke at the school auditorium. It’s no wonder why: About 800 students at Brockton High, or 22 percent of its study body, were born in the archipelago nation off the west coast of Africa.
While the timing was a coincidence, Neves’s visit to Brockton underscores several big themes in a new report documenting changes in the Black population of Greater Boston.
The report, released Thursday morning by the Boston Foundation, highlights a Black population whose makeup has become increasingly diverse and where foreign-born residents now account for more 37 percent of the region’s Black population, the largest share among any large metropolitan area in the US.
Click here for a version of this story with interactive maps from the report.
The “diversity of the Black population has exploded in recent years,” said James Jennings, an emeritus professor at Tufts University and co-author of the report, “Great Migration to Global Immigration: A Profile of Black Boston,” which was prepared in conjunction with Embrace Boston.
As the title telegraphs, while earlier waves of Black population growth in the region were the result of migration from southern states, recent growth has been driven by Blacks arriving from other countries. The share of the regional Black population that is foreign born has more than doubled since 1980, and it is nearly four times that of the US Black population as a whole.
Driving that change has been a huge increase in multiracial and multi-ethnic Black and Afro-Latino residents (primarily with Dominican or Puerto Rican ancestry). Growth in Afro-Latino residents, both from in-migration and growing identification by that designation, can explain some of the recent conflicting reports over whether Boston’s Black population has fallen or risen.
In the 2020 Census, the Black population of Boston was 19.1 percent if looking at those identifying as Black alone, but it was 25.5 percent when also including those identifying as multiracial Black or Afro-Latino. “That meant the difference in reporting a decline in the city’s Black population or an increase,” said Luc Schuster, executive director of the Boston Indicators group at the Boston Foundation and a co-author of the report.
The growth of the Black population outside Boston has been particularly pronounced in a string of communities south of the city, including Brockton, which became the first majority-Black community in Greater Boston (51 percent) with the 2020 Census.
“There’s really kind of a Black middle class southern corridor now in the region,” said Schuster.
Along with Brockton, Schuster said, there has been healthy Black community formation in Randolph, Stoughton, and Avon. But it’s also clear from that kind of concentrated growth that lots of communities in Greater Boston have seen little Black population growth.
The surge of Black migration to Brockton and other communities is also a result of Blacks being squeezed out of Boston by soaring housing costs.
The overall Black population of Greater Boston now stands at 485,000. It has roughly doubled from 1980 to 2020 as a share of the population, from 5.5 percent to 10.6 percent, according to the report.
The report found striking differences in income between different Black population subgroups. Foreign-born Black households had median income of almost $66,000, well above median household income of $55,000 for native-born Black households, and more than $20,000 higher than the $45,500 for Afro-Latino households.
Although native-born Blacks had one of the higher rates of educational attainment among Black subgroups, with 25 percent of the adult population with a bachelor’s degree or higher, their household income lagged behind most of the other Black subgroups, including Cape Verdean, Haitian, Jamaican, and African households.
The report did not attempt to explain the divergence between educational attainment and income, but Schuster said it could reflect “broader immigrant patterns” manifested through an entrepreneurial bent of newcomers toward starting businesses. At the same time, income in native-born Black households could be related to residual effects of “the worst forms of state-sponsored discrimination, back to slavery and the Jim Crow era,” he said.
The differences, however, pale in comparison to the huge chasm that remains between median overall Black household income and that for Whites and Asians, which were both over $100,000.
“It’s still small potatoes compared to the massive racial wealth gap,” said Jennings.
MICHAEL JONAS
FROM COMMONWEALTH
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OPINION
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FROM AROUND THE WEB
BEACON HILL
The office of the Child Advocate slams the state for not making enough progress in implementing reforms to protect children in the wake of the tragic case of Harmony Montgomery. (Boston Herald)
MUNICIPAL MATTERS
As furor builds over the decision to withdraw a job offer to a candidate for superintendent of schools in Easthampton because he addressed two female town officials as “ladies” in an email, one of the women is distancing herself from the fray. “I want to be clear, I am a lady,” said Suzanne Colby, executive assistant to the School Committee. (Daily Hampshire Gazette)
The Boston City Council voted to adopt a new state building code that will strongly discourage fossil fuel hookups in new construction projects in the city. (Boston Globe)
Boston city councilors continue to clash over a redistricting map approved last fall, with yesterday’s debate centered on whether to produce the nearly 6,000 pages of correspondence on the issue between the 13 councilors and the staff member coordinating efforts in redistricting chair Liz Breadon’s office. (Boston Herald)
A Defense Department training exercise at a hotel in Boston went awry when the wrong person, possibly a Delta Air Lines employee, was detained. (Associated Press)
ELECTIONS
Tuesday’s Wisconsin state Supreme Court election is the latest contest showing the electoral power of Democrats’ pro-choice stand on abortion in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade last June. (Boston Globe)
BUSINESS/ECONOMY
Former executives of a Billerica company are charged with marketing a faulty lead test. (Associated Press)
EDUCATION
Rep. Jack Lewis, of Framingham, said he is “extremely confident” that a universal school meals bill introduced during the pandemic will be made permanent in state public schools. (MetroWest Daily News)
Massachusetts has seen big increases in the share of Black and Hispanic students taking AP courses in high school, and for the second straight year the state has the highest share of high school graduates who passed an AP exam, which translates to college credits. (Boston Globe)
ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT
The operator of the Northfield Mountain pump station and two dams at Turners Falls wins support for a license renewal after promising to spend $150 million to improve fish passage in the Connecticut River. (New England Public Media)
When Maura Healey was running for governor, she called for a moratorium on tree cutting on state forest land. After taking office, Healey has taken no official action but has stopped accepting bids to cut trees on state land. The companies want to know what’s happening. (New England Public Media)
Chemicals in water drawn from the Housatonic River have fallen to safer levels, according to testing. (Berkshire Eagle)
CRIMINAL JUSTICE/COURTS
After refusing for years, Springfield has finally released a controversial rebuttal to a federal report about the police department’s narcotics unit that characterized the since-dismantled group as violent and unethical. (MassLive)
The Massachusetts Supreme Court is taking up a case challenging the powers of Secretary of State William Galvin. The case was filed by a brokerage that Galvin sought to shut down for luring inexperienced investors. (Eagle-Tribune)
MEDIA
Reade Brower, the owner of 30 newspapers in Maine, says he is considering selling the publications or converting to a new ownership model. (Bangor Daily News)
Fox News bet big on telling its viewers a version of reality they wanted to hear, and that loose attachment to the truth has now put the media empire in jeopardy. (New York Times)
PASSINGS
