State Plates
The Illinois Business Plate
In Illinois, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Illinois in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Illinois's distribution figures — 2 million Black residents, 14 percent of the state — give the scale of the community from which the state's Black-owned firms are drawn.
The National Pattern
The firm counts read locally in Illinois: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Illinois; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
In Illinois, 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. In Illinois, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
In Illinois, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. For Illinois, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Illinois; 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 Illinois's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
For Illinois, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Illinois holds about 2 million Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in six of its people, with Black alone at about 1.8 million, or 14 percent. It is in the rows below — Illinois's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
In Illinois, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Springfield, the state capital, is about a fifth Black, with a community reaching back to the free Black settlements of the 1820s. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Illinois's particular numbers.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Illinois, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. In Illinois, the benchmark panels carry both lenses at the national level. Against them, Illinois's 2 million 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.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 14%; Black share, alone or in combination: 15.6%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 2 Million. For Illinois, 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.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Illinois are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Illinois, a reader who needs the underlying counts will find them in the published tables of the source named below, from which every figure here descends without alteration beyond the rounding the source itself applies.
How this plate is read, for Illinois: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black share of the state population (alone): 14%; Black share, alone or in combination: 15.6%. In Illinois, the two presentations are one record in two forms, and a reader who checks one against the other has the plate's whole method in hand.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 14% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 15.6% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 2 Million |
| 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.