State Plates
The New Hampshire Business Plate
In New Hampshire, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black New Hampshire in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and New Hampshire's distribution figures — 35,000 Black residents, 2 percent of the state — give the scale of the community from which the state's Black-owned firms are drawn.
The National Pattern
The firm counts read locally in New Hampshire: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. 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. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank New Hampshire, but to locate it.
The firm counts read locally in New Hampshire: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. Federal statistics classify a firm as Black-owned when Black owners hold 51 percent or more of the stock or equity. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank New Hampshire; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
For New Hampshire, 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. In New Hampshire, 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 New Hampshire; 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 New Hampshire's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
For New Hampshire, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. New Hampshire holds about 35,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in forty of its people, with Black alone at about 21,000, or 1.5 percent. New Hampshire's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
For New Hampshire, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. The state's remaining Black population distributes along the Massachusetts border's suburban corridor — Nashua (roughly 4 to 5 percent Black), Salem, and the I-93 towns, whose communities are Boston-metro spillover in the census's functional terms — and around the institutions: the University of New Hampshire at Durham, Dartmouth at Hanover, the naval shipyard at Portsmouth (whose workforce lives on both sides of the Maine line), and Pease's air base legacy. The North Country and the lakes and mountain regions record Black shares under 1 percent, in the pattern of northern New England generally. It is in the rows below — New Hampshire's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of New Hampshire, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. The table's benchmark row for New Hampshire states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis. Against them, New Hampshire's 35,000 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): 2%; Black share, alone or in combination: 2.5%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 35,000. In New Hampshire, 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 New Hampshire 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 New Hampshire, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 2% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 2.5% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 35,000 |
| 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.