State Plates
The Kansas Business Plate
In Kansas, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Kansas in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Kansas's distribution figures — 235,000 Black residents, 6 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 Kansas: 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. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Kansas, but to locate it.
In Kansas, 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 Kansas, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
In Kansas, 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 Kansas, 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 Kansas; 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 Kansas's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
For Kansas, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Wichita, the state's largest city, is roughly a ninth to an eighth Black — some 45,000 to 50,000 residents — its community built by the aircraft industry's war-era and postwar labor demand (the 'Air Capital's' plants) and centered in the northeast districts around McAdams Park. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Kansas's attainment on the other.
In Kansas, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. The 235,000 in these tables live in the state those events made — and the census data record them, appropriately, in Topeka first. Held against the national ladder, Kansas's own rows say where its attainment stands.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Kansas, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so Kansas is compared on one measure and one basis only. Against them, Kansas's 235,000 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): 6%; Black share, alone or in combination: 8%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 235,000. In Kansas, 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.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Kansas: Black residents, alone or in combination: 235,000; United States benchmark — Black-owned firms with paid employees: 161,000. The measures above and these together fix the population of Kansas as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as The Kansas Business Plate. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 6%; Black share, alone or in combination: 8%. The plate states Kansas's record beside its table and lets the record speak.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 6% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 8% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 235,000 |
| 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.