State Plates
The Vermont Business Plate
In Vermont, business plates turn on ownership — the firms a population builds. This plate places Black Vermont in the national business geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black-owned businesses, and Vermont's distribution figures — 15,000 Black residents, 1 percent of the state — give the scale of the community from which the state's Black-owned firms are drawn.
The National Pattern
For Vermont, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. 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. In Vermont, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national firm counts on one side, the state's enterprise on the other.
The firm counts read locally in Vermont: the state rows below give the population whose enterprise this national pattern frames. Federal statistics classify a firm as Black-owned when Black owners hold 51 percent or more of the stock or equity. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Vermont, but to locate it.
For Vermont, 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. For Vermont, 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 Vermont; 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 Vermont's counted Black population is the ground from which its firms, employers and sole proprietors alike, are built.
The Population Behind the Plate
For Vermont, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Vermont holds about 15,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in forty of its people, with Black alone at about 9,500, or 1.5 percent. It is one of the smallest Black populations in this reference, and it contains one of the largest historical facts in the education data: the first bachelor's degree earned by a Black American was awarded in Vermont, in 1823. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Vermont's attainment on the other.
For Vermont, the national business figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. Alexander Twilight — Middlebury College class of 1823, schoolmaster, minister, and the first Black American to serve in a state legislature (Vermont's, from 1836) — built the Old Stone House in Brownington that now anchors the state's Black heritage trail. Vermont's constitutional abolition of adult slavery (1777, the first of the American states) framed the free community's entire history — a fact the state's Black heritage institutions document, alongside the complications (child indenture persisted; the Underground Railroad ran through the farm country) the honest record includes. Two sides frame the comparison here: the national ladder, and the attainment recorded in Vermont.
Household income, stated as a median — the middle household of Vermont, half above, half below — is economic geography's most compared figure. Where the table carries a national benchmark row for Vermont, the row is labeled with the basis it is published on — the same measure, the same basis, two geographies. Against them, Vermont's 15,000 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): 1%; Black share, alone or in combination: 2.4%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 15,000. In Vermont, 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 Vermont: Black residents, alone or in combination: 15,000; United States benchmark — Black-owned firms with paid employees: 161,000. The measures above and these together fix the population of Vermont as this plate describes it — its size, its share, its standing nationally — and the text that surrounds them interprets them without rounding or extension beyond the source.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 2.4% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 15,000 |
| 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.