State Plates
The North Carolina Income Plate
In North Carolina, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black North Carolina in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and North Carolina's own distribution figures — 2.5 million Black residents, 22 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For North Carolina, 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. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, North Carolina's households on the other.
In North Carolina, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table 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 midpoint is the reference; North Carolina's own rows give the standing of its households.
In North Carolina, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table 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. How North Carolina's households stand is said by its own rows, held against the national midpoint.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for North Carolina; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In North Carolina, 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 North Carolina, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. North Carolina's institutional distinction is higher education: the state holds about a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, among the most of any state. An atlas benchmark earns its place by locating North Carolina, never by ranking it.
For North Carolina, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. On this plate — the plate for North Carolina — north Carolina's profile is the series' argument for reading growth and rootedness together. For North Carolina, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, North Carolina'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 North Carolina's 2.5 million 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 North Carolina as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In North Carolina, 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 North Carolina, 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 North Carolina Income plate is one page of it.
This plate takes up its subject directly: The North Carolina Income Plate. A note on this plate's figures, stated once and plainly: Black share of the state population (alone): 22%; Black share, alone or in combination: 23.7%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 2.5 Million. In North Carolina, what the sources publish, the plate reports; what they do not, it leaves alone.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The North Carolina Income Plate — because the published record supports one. Its table records Black share of the state population (alone): 22%; Black share, alone or in combination: 23.7%. In North Carolina, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 22% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 23.7% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 2.5 Million |
| 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.