State Plates
The Vermont Income Plate
In Vermont, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Vermont in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Vermont's own distribution figures — 15,000 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 Vermont, 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, Vermont's own rows say how its households stand.
In Vermont, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table 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. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how Vermont's households stand.
In Vermont, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. 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. Vermont's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.
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 figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Vermont, 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 Vermont, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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. On one side the national ladder, on the other Vermont's attainment — that is the comparison this plate invites.
The income figures take their local meaning in Vermont, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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. Locating Vermont is the benchmark's purpose; ranking it is not.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Vermont'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 Vermont's 15,000 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 Vermont as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Vermont, 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 Vermont, 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 Vermont Income plate is one page of it.
| 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 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.