State Plates
The North Dakota Business Plate
In North Dakota, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black North Dakota in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and North Dakota's distribution figures — 42,000 Black residents, 4 percent of the state — give the scale of the community from which the state's Black-owned firms are drawn.
The National Pattern
In North Dakota, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. In North Dakota, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
For North Dakota, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Federal statistics classify a firm as Black-owned when Black owners hold 51 percent or more of the stock or equity. In North Dakota, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
The firm counts read locally in North Dakota: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. 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. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank North Dakota, but to locate it.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for North Dakota; 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 North Dakota's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
The firm counts read locally in North Dakota: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. Black North Dakota's early record is the plains pattern at its thinnest: Black soldiers at Fort Abraham Lincoln and Fort Totten, porters and barbers in the railroad towns (Fargo, Grand Forks, Bismarck, Minot), a small Fargo congregation tradition, and individual homesteaders in the settlement era — a population the censuses counted in the hundreds through the territory's first decades and in the low thousands across the twentieth century. The general record matters here only as far as it sharpens the local one, which North Dakota's table states plainly.
In North Dakota, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. The Bakken shale boom drew Black workers to the Williston Basin in the 2000s and 2010s — the oil counties' Black counts multiplied from near zero in the boom censuses, in the Wyoming energy pattern at greater amplitude — and the bust cycles thinned them in turn. In North Dakota, general material earns its place in an atlas only when it sharpens the local record, which the table below states.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of North Dakota, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so North Dakota is compared on one measure and one basis only. Against them, North Dakota's 42,000 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): 4%; Black share, alone or in combination: 5.4%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 42,000. In North Dakota, 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 North Dakota 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 North Dakota, 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) | 4% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 5.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 42,000 |
| 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.