State Plates
The Wyoming Education Plate
In Wyoming, education plates turn on attainment — the credentials a population carries. This plate places Black Wyoming in the national education geography: the benchmarks below are the published national attainment figures for Black adults, and Wyoming's distribution figures — 12,000 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
For Wyoming, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. For Black adults aged 25 and over, the Census Bureau's surveys record a population that has reached near-parity in high school completion while remaining well behind national rates in college completion: about 89 percent hold a high school diploma or higher, and about 25 percent — one in four — hold a bachelor's degree or higher. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national midpoint on one side, Wyoming's households on the other.
For Wyoming, the national attainment figures are context; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the plate's subject. At the first step, high school completion, Black adults stand at about 89 percent, close to the national figure of about 90 percent — a convergence that is historically recent and remarkable, given that as late as the mid-twentieth century a majority of Black adults had not completed high school. At the third step, the bachelor's degree, the Black figure of about 25 percent separates from the national figure of about 36 percent and the non-Hispanic White figure of about 39 percent. The comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national ladder on one side, Wyoming's attainment on the other.
In Wyoming, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Placed alongside the other groups the Census Bureau reports, the bachelor's-degree ordering reads: Asian adults at roughly 57 percent, non-Hispanic White adults at 39 percent, all adults at 36 percent, Black adults at 25 percent, and Hispanic adults at about 21 percent. Held against the national ladder, Wyoming's own rows say where its attainment stands.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for Wyoming; the benchmark rows are the published national attainment record, labeled as benchmarks. In Wyoming, attainment is a stock built over decades, so the national pattern changes slowly — and the size of the state's Black adult population is what turns that pattern into local classrooms, colleges, and workforces.
The Population Behind the Plate
In Wyoming, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Wyoming holds about 12,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in forty-eight of its people, with Black alone at about 5,500, or 1 percent. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of Wyoming.
In Wyoming, that national attainment pattern meets a state school and college system of its own, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Warren Air Force Base) hosted Black regiments of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry across the frontier decades, and Fort McKinney (at Buffalo), Fort Washakie, and Fort Bridger rotated Black companies through the territory; their veterans and laundresses and cooks formed the nucleus of Cheyenne's and Laramie's small Black neighborhoods. The coal camp at Hanna and the trona and oil towns of the twentieth century added increments; the state's Black population peaked, in share terms, in the early territorial censuses and has run near 1 percent since. The table is where the general pattern becomes Wyoming's own figures.
In Wyoming, attainment is cumulative: every graduating class adds to it, and nothing subtracts except time. That is why education plates reward patience — the national Black attainment record has risen across every measured generation, and a state like Wyoming, holding 12,000 Black residents, holds its share of that rising stock in its own schools and campuses. Benchmark rows are labeled with their basis wherever they appear, so Wyoming is compared on one measure and one basis only.
For The Wyoming Education Plate, the method is the atlas's own: named sources, published figures, and a table that carries what the map cannot. 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: 2.1%; Black residents, alone or in combination: 12,000. In Wyoming, that is the whole of the plate's claim, and it is enough for a reference.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 1% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 2.1% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 12,000 |
| United States benchmark — of Black adults hold a high school diploma or higher | 89% |
| United States benchmark — of Black adults hold a bachelor's degree or higher | 1 in 4 |
Source: National Center for Education Statistics; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey educational attainment tables. 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.