State Plates
The Massachusetts Business Plate
In Massachusetts, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Massachusetts in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Massachusetts's distribution figures — 630,000 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
For Massachusetts, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. 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 Massachusetts, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
For Massachusetts, 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. For Massachusetts, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
For Massachusetts, 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. Here, on the plate for Massachusetts, 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 Massachusetts; 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 Massachusetts's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
The firm counts read locally in Massachusetts: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. Massachusetts holds about 630,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in eleven of its people, with Black alone at about 452,000, or 6.4 percent. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which Massachusetts's table states plainly.
The firm counts read locally in Massachusetts: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. The African Meeting House on Beacon Hill (1806) is the oldest surviving Black church building in the country; the Abiel Smith School (1835) was among the first public schools built for Black children; the 54th Massachusetts Regiment's assault on Fort Wagner is the Civil War's most famous Black military episode; and Boston's abolitionist organizations — the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, the Vigilance Committee's Underground Railroad work — were the movement's institutional core. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Massachusetts, but to locate it.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Massachusetts, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. The table's benchmark row for Massachusetts states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis. Against them, Massachusetts's 630,000 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%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 630,000. In Massachusetts, 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.
The record behind this plate of Massachusetts is published, not estimated by this atlas: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Business Survey; Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics. Where the table carries a national benchmark row for Massachusetts, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Massachusetts: Black residents, alone or in combination: 630,000; United States benchmark — Black-owned firms with paid employees: 161,000. The measures above and these together fix the population of Massachusetts 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.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 8% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 9% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 630,000 |
| 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.