State Plates
The Maine Income Plate
In Maine, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Maine in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Maine's own 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
The income figures take their local meaning in Maine, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. An atlas benchmark earns its place by locating Maine, never by ranking it.
For Maine, 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. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national midpoint, and the households of Maine.
In Maine, 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. Held against the national midpoint, Maine's own rows say how its households stand.
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 figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Maine, 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
In Maine, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. 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. Maine's rows, read against the national ladder, state where its attainment stands.
In Maine, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. Read 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 table is where the general pattern becomes Maine's own figures.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Maine'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 Maine's 45,000 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 Maine as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Maine, 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. In Maine, 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 Income plate is one page of it.
The subject here is The Maine Income Plate, and the reading is the atlas's standard one: the published figures first, the interpretation after. 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, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
| 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 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.