State Plates
The Kansas Income Plate
In Kansas, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Kansas in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Kansas's own distribution figures — 235,000 Black residents, 6 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
In Kansas, 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. Held against the national midpoint, Kansas's own rows say how its households stand.
For Kansas, 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. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Kansas's households on the other.
In Kansas, 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. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Kansas's households stand.
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 figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Kansas, 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 Kansas, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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 is two-sided by design: a national ladder against Kansas's attainment.
In Kansas, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. The 235,000 in these tables live in the state those events made — and the census data record them, appropriately, in Topeka first. The ladder is national; the attainment in the rows below is Kansas's.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Kansas'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 Kansas's 235,000 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 Kansas as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Kansas, 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 Kansas, 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 Kansas Income plate is one page of it.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The Kansas Income Plate — because the published record supports one. 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. For Kansas, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
The record behind this plate of Kansas 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. The table's benchmark row for Kansas states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis.
| 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 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.