State Plates
The Idaho Income Plate
In Idaho, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Idaho in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Idaho's own distribution figures — 32,000 Black residents, 1 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
In Idaho, 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. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Idaho's households stand.
For Idaho, 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. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national midpoint, and the households of Idaho.
The income figures take their local meaning in Idaho, 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 Idaho, never by ranking it.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Idaho; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Idaho, 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 Idaho, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. Boise's Black community formed in the 1890s in River Street, the district between the Boise River and the railroad tracks southwest of downtown — a working neighborhood of porters, cooks, barbers, laborers, and their churches (St. The district's fabric was largely taken by urban renewal and freeway construction in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Erma Hayman House — a stone house built by a Black stonemason in 1907, preserved today as a city cultural site — stands as the neighborhood's surviving emblem and the anchor of Boise's Black heritage interpretation. In Idaho, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
In Idaho, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. Read for Idaho, the education data register the change first, as they do in every resettlement profile: the Boise and West Ada districts' Black enrollments have multiplied within a decade, English-learner programs in the valley serve large African cohorts, and Boise State's and the College of Western Idaho's Black student counts — small in share, growing in number — are the higher-education layer the next decade's attainment tables will be built from. Against the national ladder, the rows below place Idaho's attainment.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Idaho'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 Idaho's 32,000 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 Idaho as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Idaho, 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 Idaho, 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 Idaho Income plate is one page of it.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 1.7% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 32,000 |
| 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.