State Plates
The Alabama Income Plate
Income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Alabama in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Alabama's own distribution figures — 1.4 million Black residents, 26 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
The income figures take their local meaning in Alabama, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. Median household income is the most widely used single measure of a population's economic position, and for Black households in the United States the Census Bureau's annual income report places the figure at $56,490. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Alabama; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
In Alabama, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. Household income counts the combined money income of everyone aged 15 and over living in the home — wages, salaries, self-employment income, Social Security, pensions, interest, and cash benefits — before taxes. Alabama's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.
The income figures take their local meaning in Alabama, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. The national median household income in the same report is $77,719. Against that benchmark, the Black median of $56,490 is about 73 cents on the dollar. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Alabama stands so the plate can be read.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Alabama; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. The plate makes no state income estimate of its own — it sets the state's population, counted exactly, beside the national income record, measured exactly, which is the honest first step of any income geography.
The Population Behind the Plate
In Alabama, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. Alabama holds about 1.4 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — more than one in four of its people, with Black alone at about 1.3 million, or 26 percent. Held against the national ladder, Alabama's own rows say where its attainment stands.
For Alabama, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. The Black Belt arcs across Alabama's midsection from the Georgia line to Mississippi: a band of chalk-soil prairie counties — Wilcox, Lowndes, Dallas (whose seat is Selma), Greene, Sumter, Marengo, Hale, Perry, and their neighbors — where enslaved majorities worked the cotton economy and where Black majorities, in several counties exceeding 70 percent, persist today. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, the state's households on the other.
Household income is a median — the middle household, half above and half below — and it is the single most compared figure in economic geography. Read against the population counted on the distribution plate, the national median describes the economic center of gravity of the community that Alabama's 1.4 million Black residents belong to. The state's own metros and counties bend that center locally, and the gazetteer pages of this atlas are where those local readings accumulate.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. The income geography of Black America changes at the speed of households — of graduations, hires, diagnoses, incorporations, and moves — and the federal surveys that measure it publish on their own calendars. What does not change between releases is the structure this plate records: a counted population in Alabama, a measured national pattern, and the standing invitation to read the two together, state by state, until the whole country has been read that way. That is the work of this section of the atlas, and the Alabama Income plate is one page of it.
The subject here is The Alabama Income Plate, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 26%; Black share, alone or in combination: 28%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 1.4 Million. The atlas asks no more of the material than the material can state.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 26% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 28% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 1.4 Million |
| United States benchmark — Black median household income, Census Bureau annual report | $56,490 |
| United States benchmark — Black median household income per $1 of the national median | 73 Cents |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Income in the United States (Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement); American Community Survey. Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.