State Plates
The Delaware Business Plate
In Delaware, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Delaware in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Delaware's distribution figures — 245,000 Black residents, 22 percent of the state — give the scale of the community from which the state's Black-owned firms are drawn.
The National Pattern
In Delaware, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. The Census Bureau's Annual Business Survey counts about 161,000 Black-owned employer firms — companies with at least one paid employee — generating roughly 183 billion dollars in annual receipts and employing about 1.3 million people. In Delaware, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
In Delaware, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Federal statistics classify a firm as Black-owned when Black owners hold 51 percent or more of the stock or equity. For Delaware, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
The firm counts read locally in Delaware: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. Black Americans are 13.5 percent of the national population but own about 3 percent of employer firms, and those firms take in roughly 1 percent of the receipts of all employer businesses. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Delaware; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Delaware; the benchmark rows are the published national business record, labeled as benchmarks. Ownership rates measured nationally become concrete only at the scale of an actual population — and Delaware's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
The firm counts read locally in Delaware: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. Delaware holds about 245,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly a quarter of the First State's people, with Black alone at about 218,000, or 22 percent. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Delaware's table states plainly.
In Delaware, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. In Delaware, delaware's Black community is among the oldest in the mid-Atlantic in continuous record: a border state that held slavery to the eve of emancipation while sheltering one of the East's most active Underground Railroad corridors — Wilmington's stations and the harbor pilots' networks are the documented core of the state's freedom history — and free Black communities in its towns that predate the republic. For Delaware, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Delaware, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. The table's benchmark row for Delaware states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis. Against them, Delaware's 245,000 Black residents are the market, the workforce, and the founder pool of the state's Black business community — the three roles every business plate in this atlas keeps in view at once.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Delaware, the business 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 Delaware, 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 Delaware Business plate is one page of it.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 22%; Black share, alone or in combination: 24%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 245,000. In Delaware, each figure is published by the source named below and rounded as published; the plate's map shades the Black share of the population on the same basis, so the table and the map can be read against each other without conversion.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 22% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 24% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 245,000 |
| United States benchmark — Black-owned firms with paid employees | 161,000 |
| United States benchmark — annual receipts of Black-owned employer firms | $183 Billion |
| United States benchmark — people employed by Black-owned employer firms | 1.3 Million |
| United States benchmark — Black-owned nonemployer (solo) firms | 3 Million |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Business Survey; Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics. 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.