State Plates
The Utah Income Plate
In Utah, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Utah in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Utah's own distribution figures — 70,000 Black residents, 1 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
In Utah, 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. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Utah's households stand.
For Utah, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Utah's households on the other.
The income figures take their local meaning in Utah, 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. Not to rank Utah but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Utah; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Utah, 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
For Utah, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. The modern population centers overwhelmingly in the Salt Lake Valley: Salt Lake City itself is roughly 3 percent Black, with West Valley City (the valley's second city) at a somewhat higher share, and the suburban corridor — Taylorsville, Murray, Sandy, Midvale — holding a dispersed majority of the metro's Black residents. Ogden, the old railroad city, records the state's highest sustained share among its larger cities (in the range of 3 to 4 percent), anchored by Hill Air Force Base in adjoining Davis County. It is in the rows below — Utah's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
For Utah, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. Utah's profile is the pioneer paradox: the Black community with perhaps the most remarkable founding story of any western state — a woman who crossed the plains on foot in 1847 to join a faith that would not fully open its priesthood to her descendants until 1978 — remains one of the smallest in the data, and one of the fastest-growing. Both facts are the profile, and the distance between 1847 and the present estimates is its true subject. Here, on the plate for Utah, the plate's own table is where this general material meets the specific geography, and the two should be read together.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Utah'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 Utah's 70,000 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 Utah as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Utah, 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 Utah, 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 Utah Income plate is one page of it.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 2.1% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 70,000 |
| 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.