State Plates
The Nevada Income Plate
In Nevada, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Nevada in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Nevada's own distribution figures — 385,000 Black residents, 10 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 Nevada, 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 Nevada, never by ranking it.
The income figures take their local meaning in Nevada, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. Locating Nevada is the benchmark's purpose; ranking it is not.
For Nevada, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled 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. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Nevada's households on the other.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Nevada; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Nevada, 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
The income figures take their local meaning in Nevada, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. Nevada holds about 385,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in eight of its people, with Black alone at about 294,000, or 9.5 percent. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Nevada's own record, stated plainly in the table.
The income figures take their local meaning in Nevada, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. The Las Vegas Valley holds roughly 330,000 of the state's Black residents — the city profile gives its detail, from the Historic Westside's founding confinement to North Las Vegas and the suburban dispersal — because Clark County holds nearly three-quarters of all Nevadans. The state's remaining Black geography is quickly told: Reno–Sparks, the second metro, holds roughly 20,000 to 25,000 Black residents (in the range of 4 to 5 percent of Washoe County), built by the railroad, the university, and the warehouse-and-logistics economy of the Truckee corridor, with the community's historic center in the city's northeast districts. The general record is background; the local one — Nevada's, in the table — is the subject.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Nevada'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 Nevada's 385,000 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 Nevada as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Nevada, 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 Nevada, 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 Nevada Income plate is one page of it.
For The Nevada Income Plate, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 10%; Black share, alone or in combination: 12.4%. For Nevada, the figures are the argument; the text only keeps them in order.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 10% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 12.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 385,000 |
| 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.