State Plates
The Maine Business Plate
In Maine, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Maine in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Maine's distribution figures — 45,000 Black residents, 2 percent of the state — give the scale of the community from which the state's Black-owned firms are drawn.
The National Pattern
In Maine, 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 Maine, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
For Maine, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Federal statistics classify a firm as Black-owned when Black owners hold 51 percent or more of the stock or equity. In Maine, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
For Maine, 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. For Maine, 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 Maine; 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 Maine's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
For Maine, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. The composition makes Maine's Black population the most immigrant-origin in this reference outside the gateway metros: a majority of Black Mainers are African-born or the children of African-born parents in the survey estimates, with the Somali community the largest single group. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Maine's attainment on the other.
In Maine, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. The institutions have followed the people: Portland's and Lewiston's African community organizations, mosques serving the Somali communities (among the first established in northern New England), the African grocery and services economies of Lisbon Street and Congress Street, and the state university system's growing African student presence form a civic layer that did not exist a generation ago — the fastest institutional build-out, relative to population, of any profile in this section. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Maine's particular numbers.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Maine, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. The table's benchmark row for Maine states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis. Against them, Maine's 45,000 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.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Maine, the business 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 Maine, 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 Maine Business plate is one page of it.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 2%; Black share, alone or in combination: 3.3%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 45,000. In Maine, 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.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 2% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 3.3% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 45,000 |
| 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.