State Plates
The Maine Education Plate
In Maine, education plates turn on attainment — the credentials a population carries. This plate places Black Maine in the national education geography: the benchmarks below are the published national attainment figures for Black adults, and Maine's distribution figures — 45,000 Black residents, 2 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For Maine, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. For Black adults aged 25 and over, the Census Bureau's surveys record a population that has reached near-parity in high school completion while remaining well behind national rates in college completion: about 89 percent hold a high school diploma or higher, and about 25 percent — one in four — hold a bachelor's degree or higher. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Maine's households on the other.
The attainment ladder reads locally in Maine: the state rows below give the population whose schooling this national pattern frames. At the first step, high school completion, Black adults stand at about 89 percent, close to the national figure of about 90 percent — a convergence that is historically recent and remarkable, given that as late as the mid-twentieth century a majority of Black adults had not completed high school. At the third step, the bachelor's degree, the Black figure of about 25 percent separates from the national figure of about 36 percent and the non-Hispanic White figure of about 39 percent. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Maine, but to locate it.
The attainment ladder reads locally in Maine: the state rows below give the population whose schooling this national pattern frames. Placed alongside the other groups the Census Bureau reports, the bachelor's-degree ordering reads: Asian adults at roughly 57 percent, non-Hispanic White adults at 39 percent, all adults at 36 percent, Black adults at 25 percent, and Hispanic adults at about 21 percent. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Maine; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
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 attainment record, labeled as benchmarks. In Maine, attainment is a stock built over decades, so the national pattern changes slowly — and the size of the state's Black adult population is what turns that pattern into local classrooms, colleges, and workforces.
The Population Behind the Plate
In Maine, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Held against the national ladder, Maine's own rows say where its attainment stands.
The attainment ladder reads locally in Maine: the state rows below give the population whose schooling this national pattern frames. For Maine, 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. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Maine's table states plainly.
In Maine, attainment is cumulative: every graduating class adds to it, and nothing subtracts except time. That is why education plates reward patience — the national Black attainment record has risen across every measured generation, and a state like Maine, holding 45,000 Black residents, holds its share of that rising stock in its own schools and campuses. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so Maine is compared on one measure and one basis only.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as The Maine Education Plate. 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. The plate reports what the sources publish for Maine and leaves alone what they do not.
| 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 — of Black adults hold a high school diploma or higher | 89% |
| United States benchmark — of Black adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher | 1 in 4 |
Source: National Center for Education Statistics; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey educational attainment tables. 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.