State Plates
The Texas Business Plate
In Texas, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Texas in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Texas's distribution figures — 4 million Black residents, 13 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 Texas: 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. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Texas; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
In Texas, 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 Texas, held against the national counts, the state's own rows say how its business population stands.
For Texas, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. 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. In Texas, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Texas; 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 Texas's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
For Texas, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Black Texans are concentrated, as the state's population generally is, along the urban triangle formed by Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth, and San Antonio, with Austin at its center. It is in the rows below — Texas's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
The firm counts read locally in Texas: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. Two cautions from this reference's general method apply with force in Texas. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Texas's own record, stated plainly in the table.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Texas, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so Texas is compared on one measure and one basis only. Against them, Texas's 4 million 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): 13%; Black share, alone or in combination: 13.8%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 4 Million. For Texas, 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.
Two further figures complete the plate's account of Texas: Black residents, alone or in combination: 4 Million; United States benchmark — Black-owned firms with paid employees: 161,000. In Texas, stated together with the measures above, they fix the population this plate describes — its size, its share, and its standing against the national record — and they are the figures the surrounding text interprets, neither rounded further nor carried beyond what the source publishes.
A closing word on the use of this plate: the figures for Texas are a reference, meant to be cited, compared, and returned to. In Texas, a reader who needs the underlying counts will find them in the published tables of the source named below, from which every figure here descends without alteration beyond the rounding the source itself applies.
How this plate is read, for Texas: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black share of the state population (alone): 13%; Black share, alone or in combination: 13.8%. In Texas, the two presentations are one record in two forms, and a reader who checks one against the other has the plate's whole method in hand.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 13% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 13.8% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 4 Million |
| 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.