State Plates
The Colorado Income Plate
In Colorado, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Colorado in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Colorado's own distribution figures — 285,000 Black residents, 4 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For Colorado, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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. The plate sets the national midpoint beside Colorado's households and invites the two-sided reading.
The income figures take their local meaning in Colorado, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. Rank is not the benchmark's business — location is, and Colorado is located by it here.
For Colorado, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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. On one side the national midpoint, on the other the households of Colorado — that is the comparison this plate invites.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Colorado; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Colorado, 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 Colorado, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. Colorado holds about 285,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twenty of its people, with Black alone at about 231,000, or 4 percent. The table is where the general pattern becomes Colorado's own figures.
For Colorado, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. Colorado Springs, the corridor's southern anchor, holds the second community — some 45,000 to 55,000 Black residents in its metro — shaped by the military economy of Fort Carson and the Air Force installations at a share well above the state's. Boulder records a small, university-shaped Black population at roughly 1 to 2 percent of the city, among the smallest shares of any major college town in this reference; Fort Collins, Greeley, and Pueblo record small communities in the low single digits, Pueblo's with steel-era roots. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Colorado's attainment on the other.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Colorado's among them. Read against the population counted on the distribution plate, the national median describes the economic center of gravity of the community that Colorado's 285,000 Black residents belong to. Holding the structure still while the numbers move is the gazetteer's work — the only way an atlas stays honest across editions, for Colorado as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Colorado, 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 Colorado, 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 Colorado Income plate is one page of it.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as The Colorado Income Plate. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 4%; Black share, alone or in combination: 5%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 285,000. In Colorado, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 4% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 5% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 285,000 |
| 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.