In Alabama, Birmingham City schools enroll 20,770 students, and 83.2% of them are Black. That is the highest share of any school district in the country with at least 20,000 students. No other large district crosses 80%. Birmingham sits at the top of a list that, read closely, tells two different stories about where Black students in America actually go to school.
allk12 pulled enrollment counts from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data for the 2024-25 school year and ranked every district serving 20,000 or more students by the percentage of enrollment reported as Black or African American. The 20,000-student floor keeps the focus on large school systems. Eighteen districts clear that bar with a Black enrollment majority. Here is the full list.
| District | State | Enrollment | % Black |
|---|---|---|---|
| Birmingham City | Alabama | 20,770 | 83.2% |
| Detroit Public Schools Community District | Michigan | 48,272 | 79.2% |
| Bibb County | Georgia | 20,936 | 76.5% |
| Montgomery County | Alabama | 26,958 | 74.4% |
| Richmond County | Georgia | 30,573 | 71.6% |
| Memphis-Shelby County Schools | Tennessee | 111,252 | 71.2% |
| Atlanta Public Schools | Georgia | 49,945 | 70.0% |
| Baltimore City Public Schools | Maryland | 76,431 | 69.3% |
| Clayton County | Georgia | 51,326 | 66.9% |
| East Baton Rouge Parish | Louisiana | 39,914 | 66.6% |
| Richland 01 | South Carolina | 21,814 | 65.5% |
| Henry County | Georgia | 43,012 | 64.4% |
| Caddo Parish | Louisiana | 32,539 | 63.3% |
| Richland 02 | South Carolina | 28,841 | 62.8% |
| Cleveland Municipal | Ohio | 32,502 | 61.3% |
| Cincinnati Public Schools | Ohio | 33,477 | 57.7% |
| Charles County Public Schools | Maryland | 28,162 | 57.6% |
| Douglas County | Georgia | 25,521 | 57.4% |
Two Kinds of District on One List
One group is the set of legacy big-city systems that have carried majority-Black enrollment for generations. Detroit Public Schools Community District in Michigan is second overall at 79.2%. Memphis-Shelby County Schools in Tennessee is the largest district on the list by a wide margin, 111,252 students, and still 71.2% Black. Baltimore City Public Schools in Maryland enrolls 76,431 at 69.3%. Ohio contributes two of these older urban systems, Cleveland Municipal at 61.3% and Cincinnati Public Schools at 57.7%. These are the districts most people picture when they think of a majority-Black school system: the urban core of a Rust Belt or Mid-Atlantic city, shaped by decades of migration, housing policy, and the outward move of other families.
The second group is Southern, and it is heavily concentrated in Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana. Birmingham City tops the whole list. Montgomery County, the district covering Alabama's capital, is 74.4% Black. Georgia's Bibb County, which is the Macon system, comes in at 76.5%, and Richmond County, the Augusta system, at 71.6%. In Louisiana, East Baton Rouge Parish is 66.6% and Caddo Parish, built around Shreveport, is 63.3%. These are Deep South county and parish districts, and several of them are mid-sized systems rather than giant urban ones. They reflect the long-standing demographics of the places they serve.
The Atlanta Suburbs Change the Story
The detail that complicates the simple urban-versus-Southern read is Georgia, which places five districts on the list, more than any other state. One of them, Atlanta Public Schools at 70.0%, is the expected central-city system. The other four are not the city. Clayton County (66.9%), Henry County (64.4%), and Douglas County (57.4%) are suburban county districts ringing metropolitan Atlanta, and all three now report Black enrollment majorities.
That is a different phenomenon than the old-urban-core story. These counties were not majority-Black school systems a generation ago and their enrollment reflects a well-documented demographic shift: Black families moving out of the central city and into the suburban counties around it, a reverse of the mid-century pattern. The school numbers are downstream of that move. A ranking like this one captures the result without needing to explain the cause, but the cause is worth naming, because it means majority-Black district no longer maps neatly onto inner city. In metro Atlanta it increasingly describes the suburbs.
South Carolina's two entries, Richland 01 (65.5%) and Richland 02 (62.8%), sit in and around Columbia and show a version of the same split within one metro: an older core district and a growing suburban one, both now majority-Black. Maryland's Charles County Public Schools at 57.6%, a suburban district south of Washington, tells a similar suburban story on the Mid-Atlantic side.
The cutoff
The 20,000-student cutoff means smaller districts with even higher Black shares are excluded by design. There are plenty of small-town and rural districts across the South would rank higher on percentage alone, but the point of the floor is to look at the large systems that educate tens of thousands of students at a time. The largest here, Memphis-Shelby County, enrolls more than 111,000; the smallest that qualify hover just above 20,000.
Sources
allk12 analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) enrollment data, SY 2024-25.
NCES, Common Core of Data
