State Plates
The Rhode Island Business Plate
In Rhode Island, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Rhode Island in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Rhode Island's distribution figures — 110,000 Black residents, 8 percent of the state — give the scale of the community from which the state's Black-owned firms are drawn.
The National Pattern
The firm counts read locally in Rhode Island: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. 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. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Rhode Island, but to locate it.
In Rhode Island, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Federal statistics classify a firm as Black-owned when Black owners hold 51 percent or more of the stock or equity. In Rhode Island, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
The firm counts read locally in Rhode Island: 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Rhode Island; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Rhode Island; 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 Rhode Island's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
In Rhode Island, that national business pattern meets the state's own firms and employers, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Rhode Island holds about 110,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in ten of its people, with Black alone at about 75,000, or 6.8 percent. Read back against the table, the general pattern resolves into Rhode Island's particular numbers.
For Rhode Island, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Providence, the capital, holds the largest share: the city is roughly a sixth to a fifth Black (some 30,000 to 35,000 residents), concentrated in the South Side (the districts along Elmwood Avenue and Broad Street), the West End, and the older neighborhoods around the colleges — a community built by the jewelry and textile mills' labor demand, the railroads, and, in the modern era, the hospitals and universities that are the city's employers. East Providence, Woonsocket (the northern mill city), and Cranston hold the smaller suburban and mill-town communities; the state's Black population is concentrated in the Providence metro's ring, with the coastal and rural counties below 2 percent almost everywhere. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Rhode Island's attainment on the other.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Rhode Island, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. The table's benchmark row for Rhode Island states its basis in its label — the comparison rests on the same measure on the same basis. Against them, Rhode Island's 110,000 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): 8%; Black share, alone or in combination: 10%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 110,000. In Rhode Island, 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 Rhode Island 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 Rhode Island, 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) | 8% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 10% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 110,000 |
| 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.