State Plates
The Rhode Island Income Plate
In Rhode Island, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Rhode Island in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Rhode Island's own distribution figures — 110,000 Black residents, 8 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
In Rhode Island, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table 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. Held against the national midpoint, Rhode Island's own rows say how its households stand.
The income figures take their local meaning in Rhode Island, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. Not to rank Rhode Island but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
The income figures take their local meaning in Rhode Island, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. An atlas benchmark earns its place by locating Rhode Island, never by ranking it.
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 figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Rhode Island, 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 Rhode Island, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark 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. The general record is background; the local one — Rhode Island's, in the table — is the subject.
In Rhode Island, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. 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. Rhode Island's rows, read against the national ladder, state where its attainment stands.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Rhode Island'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 Rhode Island's 110,000 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 Rhode Island as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Rhode Island, 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 Rhode Island, 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 Rhode Island Income plate is one page of it.
| 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 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.