Missing-persons cases from the past 5 years, drawn from the reporting of the Black and Missing Foundation, Inc., TheGrio, plotted below. Use the dropdowns to search by state, time frame, or group by age, sex, or race. Tap or click any marker for the full case, a source link, and a NamUs verification link. This page does not add, alter, or infer any detail not stated in the source outlet’s own reporting — race is left “Unknown” unless the source article states it explicitly.
Below that sits a second, wider map: a heat map of every active case the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children currently publishes nationwide. The first map is who; the heat map is where. Filter it and zoom into your own county or city.
The national picture: how many people are reported missing each year
The maps on this page show individual cases that have public details. They are a sample, not the national total. The national total comes from the FBI’s NCIC missing person file, shown here for 2024.
Black people listed as missing in NamUs, county by county
Every unresolved case in the U.S. Department of Justice missing persons database (NamUs) where the person is recorded as Black / African American, or as multiracial including Black: 4,682 cases, as of September 25, 2026. Each bubble is a county; larger means more cases. Use the filters to narrow by state, age, sex or the year the person was last seen.
What this shows: the county where each person was last seen, as entered in NamUs. 32 cases with no county (or in a U.S. territory) are counted in the totals but left off the map. Names, case numbers and case details are not reproduced here; the full public record for each person is on NamUs.
What it does not show: NamUs holds 26,629 unresolved missing person cases in total and is not a complete list of everyone reported missing. Only 17 states require police to enter cases, so the rest depend on voluntary entry, and many short-lived cases are resolved before they would ever be entered. The far larger FBI count above (about 193,000 Black entries in 2024) is of reports made, most resolved quickly, not of people who stay missing.
Race is as recorded by the reporting agency or family. Source: NamUs (namus.gov), unresolved missing person cases, race filter Black / African American, county centroids from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Tap or click a marker on the map to see full case details and a source link here.
Latest missing-person reports
Updated October 3, 2026 at 01:31 UTC. Headlines link to the original reporting and are not rewritten.
What the case reports show
These charts are rebuilt from the same cases plotted above every time this page updates. Each one states the number of cases it is drawn from, and each is limited to details the source articles actually report -- where an article does not say, the case is counted as unknown or left out of that chart rather than estimated.
Where cases concentrate
The map above plots individual cases this site has verified one by one. This one is the wider picture: every active case the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children currently publishes, 3,449 of them, drawn as a density map so you can see where they cluster. Use the filters to narrow it, then pinch, scroll or drag to zoom all the way into your own county and city.
Source: active case records published by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), retrieved September 15, 2026; 3,449 cases plotted. Coordinates are from the U.S. Census Bureau 2024 Gazetteer, matched on the city or county NCMEC lists for each case — each point is that place's centre, not an exact last-seen location. 142 case(s) NCMEC lists could not be matched to a place and are not plotted. Brighter areas mean more recorded cases, which tracks population as well as risk: a dense metro will glow more than a rural county with a higher per-person rate. Read it as where cases are, not as where danger is highest.
The counties with the most active NCMEC cases under the filters you have chosen. Counts follow population closely — this ranks where cases are recorded, not per-person risk. 350 of these cases carry no county in NCMEC's record, so they appear on the map above but not in this ranking.
If you have information about any case above, contact the Black and Missing Foundation at 1-877-972-2634, or submit/search a case directly at namus.gov. See our related Strange Fruit coverage for individual case updates.
How this tracker works
- What it tracks: news about missing-person reports involving Black Americans.
- Where headlines come from: Google News searches for “missing Black,” “Black and Missing” and “Ebony Alert” covering the past four days; stories from outside the U.S. are excluded.
- What it adds and doesn’t: each entry is the outlet’s own headline, linked to the original. Nothing is rewritten or summarised by AI.
- Labels: tags say what kind of source a story comes from (official source, wire service, national, local or international outlet, academic source, or social media post). They are not ratings of accuracy or trust. Opinion pieces are tagged OPINION and kept out of the Latest box.
- Updates: twice a day, at about 8:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. Central. The Latest box shows the four newest non-opinion stories, one report per story, with a count of other outlets that covered it.
- Current source mix (last 17 entries): local outlet 9, news outlet 5, national outlet 2, international outlet 1, from 13 different outlets.
- Spot an error? Tell us and we will correct it.
Research behind these features
- Curry, A. L., & Stroud, N. J. (2021). The effects of journalistic transparency on credibility assessments and engagement intentions. Journalism, 22(4). Explaining how and why a story was produced raised readers’ credibility ratings, across political ideologies. This is why each tracker explains its sourcing and filters.
- Otis, A. (2024). The effects of transparency cues on news source credibility online: An investigation of ‘opinion labels’. Journalism. Labelling opinion content on story previews increased the perceived credibility of the source. Opinion pieces here are labelled and kept out of the Latest box.
- Aslett, K., et al. (2022). News credibility labels have limited average effects on news diet quality and fail to reduce misperceptions. Science Advances, 8(18). Trust ratings on sources did not, on average, change what people read or believe. So the tags here describe what kind of source a story comes from, not whether to trust it.
- Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral reading and the nature of expertise. Teachers College Record, 121(11). Professional fact-checkers judge a claim by quickly checking what other sources say. Each latest story links to other coverage of the same headline.
- Pennycook, G., et al. (2021). Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online. Nature, 592, 590–595. A brief prompt to think about accuracy improved the quality of news people chose to share. The Latest box ends with that prompt.