State Plates
The Delaware Health Plate
In Delaware, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black Delaware in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, and Delaware's distribution figures — 245,000 Black residents, 22 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
The coverage figures take their local form in Delaware, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. About one in ten Black Americans — roughly 9 to 10 percent in the Census Bureau's annual coverage report — has no health insurance at all, a rate above the national figure and above the White rate. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Delaware stands so the plate can be read.
For Delaware, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. Rates in this article are for the full population unless stated; nonelderly rates run higher than the all-ages figures because Medicare covers nearly everyone past 65 — one reason the Black uninsured problem is concentrated among working-age adults, as the age breakdown below shows. In Delaware, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national coverage pattern on one side, the state's system on the other.
In Delaware, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Employer-sponsored insurance is the largest single source, covering about half of Black Americans, through their own jobs or a family member's — a share below the White figure, reflecting the employment and occupational data of this reference: fewer Black workers in the large-firm, high-benefit sectors, more in service, temporary, and small-employer jobs where offers of coverage are thinner. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Delaware's households stand.
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 health record, labeled as benchmarks. In Delaware, health measures are survey-based, so the plate carries the survey sources on its face and treats the national pattern as the frame inside which state health agencies publish their own state-level readings.
The Population Behind the Plate
For Delaware, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. 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. Below, the table's rows belong to Delaware, and there the general becomes particular.
For Delaware, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. Read for 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. Here, on the plate for Delaware, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
In Delaware, coverage is the gateway measure: it decides whether the rest of the health system is reachable at ordinary cost. The national Black coverage record, carried here as the benchmark, is the product of federal and state policy layered over the population this atlas counts — and in Delaware that population numbers 245,000. In Delaware, prevalence measures, from hypertension to diabetes, sit downstream of coverage, which is why this plate leads with the insurance record.
For The Delaware Health Plate, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. 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. For Delaware, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Delaware: Black residents, alone or in combination: 245,000; United States benchmark — Black Americans without health insurance coverage, approximately: 1 in 10. The measures above and these together fix the population of Delaware as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
| 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 Americans without health insurance coverage, approximately | 1 in 10 |
| United States benchmark — Black Americans covered by Medicaid, approximately — and about one in three Black children | 1 in 5 |
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; U.S. Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (Current Population 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.