State Plates
The North Dakota Education Plate
In North Dakota, education plates turn on attainment — the credentials a population carries. This plate places Black North Dakota in the national education geography: the benchmarks below are the published national attainment figures for Black adults, and North Dakota's distribution figures — 42,000 Black residents, 4 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
In North Dakota, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. For Black adults aged 25 and over, the Census Bureau's surveys record a population that has reached near-parity in high school completion while remaining well behind national rates in college completion: about 89 percent hold a high school diploma or higher, and about 25 percent — one in four — hold a bachelor's degree or higher. Held against the national midpoint, North Dakota's own rows say how its households stand.
The attainment ladder reads locally in North Dakota: the state rows below give the population whose schooling this national pattern frames. At the first step, high school completion, Black adults stand at about 89 percent, close to the national figure of about 90 percent — a convergence that is historically recent and remarkable, given that as late as the mid-twentieth century a majority of Black adults had not completed high school. At the third step, the bachelor's degree, the Black figure of about 25 percent separates from the national figure of about 36 percent and the non-Hispanic White figure of about 39 percent. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank North Dakota; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
In North Dakota, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Placed alongside the other groups the Census Bureau reports, the bachelor's-degree ordering reads: Asian adults at roughly 57 percent, non-Hispanic White adults at 39 percent, all adults at 36 percent, Black adults at 25 percent, and Hispanic adults at about 21 percent. Held against the national ladder, North Dakota's own rows say where its attainment stands.
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 attainment record, labeled as benchmarks. In North Dakota, attainment is a stock built over decades, so the national pattern changes slowly — and the size of the state's Black adult population is what turns that pattern into local classrooms, colleges, and workforces.
The Population Behind the Plate
For North Dakota, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. For North Dakota, 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. North Dakota's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
For North Dakota, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. 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, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as The North Dakota Education Plate. 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. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for North Dakota.
The record behind this plate of North Dakota is published, not estimated by this atlas: National Center for Education Statistics; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey educational attainment tables. The table's benchmark row for North Dakota states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis.
| 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 — of Black adults hold a high school diploma or higher | 89% |
| United States benchmark — of Black adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher | 1 in 4 |
Source: National Center for Education Statistics; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey educational attainment tables. 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.