State Plates
The Nebraska Education Plate
In Nebraska, education plates turn on attainment — the credentials a population carries. This plate places Black Nebraska in the national education geography: the benchmarks below are the published national attainment figures for Black adults, and Nebraska's distribution figures — 140,000 Black residents, 5 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For Nebraska, 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. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national midpoint, and the households of Nebraska.
The attainment ladder reads locally in Nebraska: 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Nebraska; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
In Nebraska, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Held against the national ladder, Nebraska's own rows say where its attainment stands.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Nebraska; the benchmark rows are the published national attainment record, labeled as benchmarks. In Nebraska, 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
For Nebraska, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Nebraska holds about 140,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in fourteen of its people, with Black alone at about 96,000, or 4.9 percent. Nearly two-thirds live in Omaha, and within Omaha, the community's historic center — North Omaha — is one of the most storied Black districts of the plains: a railroad and meatpacking community that produced Malcolm X (born in Omaha in 1925) and a jazz scene of regional fame. Nebraska's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
For Nebraska, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. For Nebraska, nebraska's Black indicators present the plains pattern with one sharp internal divide: the state's overall Black medians (income, attainment through the university system, homeownership in the smaller cities) sit mid-pack for the region, while North Omaha's tracts record concentrated indicators at the difficult end of any table in this reference — the metro's intra-city spread is the state's defining data fact. The plate sets the national midpoint beside Nebraska's households and invites the two-sided reading.
In Nebraska, 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 Nebraska, holding 140,000 Black residents, holds its share of that rising stock in its own schools and campuses. The table's benchmark row for Nebraska states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis.
A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 5%; Black share, alone or in combination: 7.2%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 140,000. In Nebraska, 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) | 5% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 7.2% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 140,000 |
| 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.