State Plates
The North Dakota Health Plate
In North Dakota, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black North Dakota in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, 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
The coverage figures take their local form in North Dakota, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. About one in ten Black Americans — roughly 9 to 10 percent in the Census Bureau's annual coverage report — has no health insurance at all, a rate above the national figure and above the White rate. The benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where North Dakota stands so the plate can be read.
For North Dakota, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. Rates in this article are for the full population unless stated; nonelderly rates run higher than the all-ages figures because Medicare covers nearly everyone past 65 — one reason the Black uninsured problem is concentrated among working-age adults, as the age breakdown below shows. In North Dakota, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national coverage pattern on one side, the state's system on the other.
For North Dakota, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. Employer-sponsored insurance is the largest single source, covering about half of Black Americans, through their own jobs or a family member's — a share below the White figure, reflecting the employment and occupational data of this reference: fewer Black workers in the large-firm, high-benefit sectors, more in service, temporary, and small-employer jobs where offers of coverage are thinner. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, North Dakota's households on the other.
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 health record, labeled as benchmarks. In North Dakota, health measures are survey-based, so the plate carries the survey sources on its face and treats the national pattern as the frame inside which state health agencies publish their own state-level readings.
The Population Behind the Plate
In North Dakota, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Here, on the plate 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. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into North Dakota's particular numbers.
The coverage figures take their local form in North Dakota, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. 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, read with the table, the general pattern and the local figures correct each other.
In North Dakota, coverage is the gateway measure: it decides whether the rest of the health system is reachable at ordinary cost. The national Black coverage record, carried here as the benchmark, is the product of federal and state policy layered over the population this atlas counts — and in North Dakota that population numbers 42,000. In North Dakota, prevalence measures, from hypertension to diabetes, sit downstream of coverage, which is why this plate leads with the insurance record.
This plate takes up its subject directly: The North Dakota Health 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. In North Dakota, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
| 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 Americans without health insurance coverage, approximately | 1 in 10 |
| United States benchmark — Black Americans covered by Medicaid, approximately — and about one in three Black children | 1 in 5 |
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; U.S. Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (Current Population 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.