State Plates
The New Hampshire Income Plate
In New Hampshire, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black New Hampshire in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and New Hampshire's own distribution figures — 35,000 Black residents, 2 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 New Hampshire, 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. The point of the benchmark is position: where New Hampshire stands, stated before anything is made of it.
The income figures take their local meaning in New Hampshire, 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. Rank is not the benchmark's business — location is, and New Hampshire is located by it here.
For New Hampshire, 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, New Hampshire's households 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 figures, labeled as benchmarks. In New Hampshire, 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
For New Hampshire, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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. Below, the table's rows belong to New Hampshire, and there the general becomes particular.
In New Hampshire, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. 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. The table is where the general pattern becomes New Hampshire's own figures.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, New Hampshire'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 New Hampshire's 35,000 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 New Hampshire as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In New Hampshire, 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 New Hampshire, 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 New Hampshire Income plate is one page of it.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of New Hampshire: Black residents, alone or in combination: 35,000; United States benchmark — Black median household income, Census Bureau annual report: $56,490. The measures above and these together fix the population of New Hampshire as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
| 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 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.