State Plates
The Nebraska Income Plate
In Nebraska, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Nebraska in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Nebraska's own 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 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. On one side the national midpoint, on the other the households of Nebraska — that is the comparison this plate invites.
For Nebraska, 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. The comparison is two-sided by design: a national midpoint against Nebraska's households.
The income figures take their local meaning in Nebraska, 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. Locating Nebraska is the benchmark's purpose; ranking it is not.
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 figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Nebraska, 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 Nebraska, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. 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. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Nebraska.
For Nebraska, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. Read 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. What the plate asks the reader to hold together is the midpoint of the nation and the households of Nebraska.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Nebraska'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 Nebraska's 140,000 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 Nebraska as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Nebraska, 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 Nebraska, what does not change between releases is the structure this plate records: a counted population in Nebraska, 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 Nebraska Income plate is one page of it.
| 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 — 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.