State Plates
The Delaware Income Plate
In Delaware, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Delaware in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Delaware's own 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
In Delaware, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table 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. Delaware's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.
The income figures take their local meaning in Delaware, 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. Not to rank Delaware but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
The income figures take their local meaning in Delaware, 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. An atlas benchmark earns its place by locating Delaware, never by ranking it.
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 figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Delaware, 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
The income figures take their local meaning in Delaware, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Delaware's own record, stated plainly in the table.
In Delaware, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. On this plate — the plate 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, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Delaware'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 Delaware's 245,000 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 Delaware as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Delaware, 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. In Delaware, 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 Income plate is one page of it.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The Delaware Income Plate — because the published record supports one. 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. Here, on the plate for Delaware, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
| 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 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.