State Plates
The Mississippi Income Plate
In Mississippi, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Mississippi in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Mississippi's own distribution figures — its counted population Black residents, 38 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For Mississippi, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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. The plate sets the national midpoint beside Mississippi's households and invites the two-sided reading.
In Mississippi, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table 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. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Mississippi's households stand.
The income figures take their local meaning in Mississippi, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Mississippi stands so the plate can be read.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Mississippi; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Mississippi, 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 Mississippi, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. The decennial census counted Black Mississippians at about 37 percent of the population Black alone, and about 38 percent Black alone or in combination — the highest share of any state, a position Mississippi has held throughout the modern census era. In absolute terms the population is about 1.1 million, modest beside the giants of this series; it is the share, and what the share has meant across Mississippi's history, that makes the profile central to this reference. The table is where the general pattern becomes Mississippi's own figures.
The income figures take their local meaning in Mississippi, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. The Mississippi Delta — the flat alluvial plain in the state's northwest, among the richest farmland on earth — records the country's most extensive majority-Black rural geography: county after county above 60, 70, and in Holmes County's case around 80 percent Black. The county map of Black Mississippi is, with unusual literalness, a map of where enslaved labor was concentrated in 1860 — the demographic foundation on which everything else in the state's data rests. Here, on the plate for Mississippi, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Mississippi'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 Mississippi's its counted population 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 Mississippi as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Mississippi, 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. What does not change between releases is the structure this plate records: a counted population in Mississippi, 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 Mississippi Income plate is one page of it.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 38% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 38% |
| Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination (Census Bureau population estimates) | 52.8 million |
| 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; U.S. Census Bureau, Population Estimates Program. 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.