State Plates
The Iowa Income Plate
In Iowa, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Iowa in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Iowa's own distribution figures — 200,000 Black residents, 4 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
The income figures take their local meaning in Iowa, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. Rank is not the benchmark's business — location is, and Iowa is located by it here.
In Iowa, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table 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. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Iowa's households stand.
In Iowa, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. 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. Iowa's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Iowa; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Iowa, 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
For Iowa, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. From 1900 to the mid-1920s, the Consolidation Coal Company's town of Buxton, in Monroe County, held a population in the thousands — a majority of them Black, recruited from the Virginia and Kentucky fields — in a community whose Black residents served as mayor's appointees, council members, doctors, lawyers, and store owners, educated their children in integrated schools, and drew national attention as a working refutation of the era's assumptions. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Iowa's attainment on the other.
For Iowa, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. Read for Iowa, iowa's Black indicators follow the northern-plains pattern with the packing towns' asterisk: state-level medians mid-pack for the Midwest (attainment through the regents universities, homeownership in the smaller cities comparatively strong), against Waterloo's east-side tracts and the packing towns' wage data at the difficult end. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national midpoint, and the households of Iowa.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Iowa'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 Iowa's 200,000 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 Iowa as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Iowa, 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 Iowa, 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 Iowa Income plate is one page of it.
This plate takes up its subject directly: The Iowa Income Plate. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 4%; Black share, alone or in combination: 6.3%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 200,000. The plate reports what the sources publish for Iowa and leaves alone what they do not.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 4% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 6.3% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 200,000 |
| 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.