Demographics of The Bronx - Black and African American Population

Black and African American Population

At the 2009 American Community Survey, Blacks represented 37.5% of the population, with 30.8% being non-Hispanic Blacks. Over 526,200 blacks reside in the borough, of which 419,600 are non-Hispanic blacks. Over 61,000 people identified themselves as "Sub-Saharan African" in the survey, making up 4.4% of the population. Those whose ancestors have been in the United States since before the end of slavery are one group. Another is those of Caribbean ancestry. Colin Powell, a son of Jamaican immigrants, grew up in the Bronx. Some people have ancestries from both these groups, and like most African-American communities many people in both these groups have European and Native American ancestry as well. A third group, that is actually more internally diverse than these other two is African immigrants. They hail primarily from West Africa. The largest numbers come from Nigeria, but other nations such as Liberia, Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, to name just a few, have contributed to this population.