How to Select the right areas?

I have a gif image. It is a black and white outline of the state of New York. How do I select just the outside area to delete the background?

If I use the magic wand, It selects all the white. Then when I delete, it deletes the entire background and leaves only the black outline.

I want the black outline and the interior white area. How can I properly select this?

Thanks for any advice

Before using the magic wand tool, check the "Contiguous" box at the top of the photoshop window. This will make it so only pixels that are connected are selected. So as long as you have a solid black outline of new york without any breaks in it, it should only select the outside white area, leaving the interior white area intact.

I would leave the magic wand in the box for this one ;)

I would use a colour range command.

Select>Colour Range - In the dropdown select box choose either highlights or shadows (depending on which colour you wish to isolate)

Colour range is useful for operations such as this because it has a slider that is far more poweful than fiddling with the magic wand, chances are that the magic wand may not pick up the anti-aliased pixels, without much fiddling.

Except that he doesn't want to select the interior white area... So that wouldn't work because it would select all of the white. If you did that you would then have to go in and Unselect the interior white area, which would be even more steps than just using the wand tool on the outside white area. And the wand tool has different sensitivity levels too, and works just as well as the select color thing in most cases for me. I use it all the time.

Alt-click once in the middle to deselect

Not saying that your method was wrong deker, just goes to show there is always more than one route to complete a task in PS