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Texas — The nation’s African-American population continued its southward migration over the past decade, shifting a large part of the black middle class from northern states to faster-growing economies of the South.

Among 25 big U.S. metro areas with the largest growth in African-American population between 2000 and 2009, 16 were in the South—including Atlanta and Dallas—according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Among the big losers were cities in the North and West, including Detroit, Los Angeles and Cleveland.

The biggest gainer was Atlanta, a magnet for black professionals. Its metro area added about 500,000 African-Americans between the 2000 and 2009 period, and more than twice the next-largest numeric gainer, Dallas, according to an analysis of Census data by William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Over the same period, the share of Atlanta’s 25-and-over black population that had college degrees increased to 24.6% in 2009 from 21.5% in 2000.

Other southern cities including Houston, Charlotte, N.C., and Raleigh, N.C., were also among the nation’s biggest gainers of African-Americans over the decade, each with higher-than-average growth in their black college-educated population, many of them newcomers, according to Mr. Frey.

Read more at WSJ

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