State Plates
The Georgia Income Plate
In Georgia, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Georgia in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Georgia's own distribution figures — 3.6 million Black residents, 33 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For Georgia, 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 Georgia's households and invites the two-sided reading.
For Georgia, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled 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. On one side the national midpoint, on the other the households of Georgia — that is the comparison this plate invites.
The income figures take their local meaning in Georgia, 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. Locating Georgia is the benchmark's purpose; ranking it is not.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Georgia; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Georgia, 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 Georgia, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. Georgia's Black geography has two layers. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Georgia's table states plainly.
In Georgia, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. By share, Georgia at roughly one in three is exceeded among states only by Mississippi and Louisiana and by the District of Columbia as a city jurisdiction; by scale, its 3.6 million rank near the very top. In Georgia, held against the national pattern, the state's own rows say how its coverage stands.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Georgia'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 Georgia's 3.6 million 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 Georgia as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Georgia, 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 Georgia, 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 Georgia Income plate is one page of it.
This plate takes up its subject directly: The Georgia Income Plate. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 33%; Black share, alone or in combination: 33.5%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 3.6 Million. In Georgia, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
In Georgia, the record behind this plate of Georgia is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, Income in the United States (Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement); American Community Survey. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so Georgia is compared on one measure and one basis only.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 33% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 33.5% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 3.6 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.