State Plates
The Kentucky Business Plate
In Kentucky, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Kentucky in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Kentucky's distribution figures — 420,000 Black residents, 8 percent of the state — give the scale of the community from which the state's Black-owned firms are drawn.
The National Pattern
In Kentucky, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. In Kentucky, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
In Kentucky, 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. For Kentucky, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
For Kentucky, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. 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. In Kentucky, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Kentucky; 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 Kentucky's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
In Kentucky, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Kentucky holds about 420,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — nearly one in ten of its people, with Black alone at about 361,000, or 8 percent. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Kentucky.
The firm counts read locally in Kentucky: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. Louisville and its Jefferson County hold roughly a third of all Black Kentuckians — about 140,000 people, more than a fifth of the consolidated city-county — and the community reaches to the city's founding, built by enslaved and free Black labor on the Ohio River's falls portage. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Kentucky, but to locate it.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Kentucky, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so Kentucky is compared on one measure and one basis only. Against them, Kentucky's 420,000 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): 8%; Black share, alone or in combination: 9.3%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 420,000. In Kentucky, 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 Kentucky: Black residents, alone or in combination: 420,000; United States benchmark — Black-owned firms with paid employees: 161,000. The measures above and these together fix the population of Kentucky 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.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Kentucky are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Kentucky, 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.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 8% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 9.3% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 420,000 |
| 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.