State Plates
The Wyoming Health Plate
In Wyoming, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black Wyoming in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, 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
The coverage figures take their local form in Wyoming, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. About one in ten Black Americans — roughly 9 to 10 percent in the Census Bureau's annual coverage report — has no health insurance at all, a rate above the national figure and above the White rate. That is what a benchmark is for in an atlas: not to rank Wyoming, but to locate it.
The coverage figures take their local form in Wyoming, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. Rates in this article are for the full population unless stated; nonelderly rates run higher than the all-ages figures because Medicare covers nearly everyone past 65 — one reason the Black uninsured problem is concentrated among working-age adults, as the age breakdown below shows. A benchmark in an atlas does not rank Wyoming; it locates it, and that is its whole use here.
In Wyoming, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Employer-sponsored insurance is the largest single source, covering about half of Black Americans, through their own jobs or a family member's — a share below the White figure, reflecting the employment and occupational data of this reference: fewer Black workers in the large-firm, high-benefit sectors, more in service, temporary, and small-employer jobs where offers of coverage are thinner. Held against the national midpoint, Wyoming's own rows say how its households stand.
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 health record, labeled as benchmarks. In Wyoming, health measures are survey-based, so the plate carries the survey sources on its face and treats the national pattern as the frame inside which state health agencies publish their own state-level readings.
The Population Behind the Plate
The coverage figures take their local form in Wyoming, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. 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. National material earns its place on this plate only where it sharpens Wyoming's own record, stated plainly in the table.
The coverage figures take their local form in Wyoming, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. 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 general record is background; the local one — Wyoming's, in the table — is the subject.
In Wyoming, coverage is the gateway measure: it decides whether the rest of the health system is reachable at ordinary cost. The national Black coverage record, carried here as the benchmark, is the product of federal and state policy layered over the population this atlas counts — and in Wyoming that population numbers 12,000. In Wyoming, prevalence measures, from hypertension to diabetes, sit downstream of coverage, which is why this plate leads with the insurance record.
What follows is the plate the atlas files as The Wyoming Health Plate. 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, a reader who holds the table and this text together has the plate entire.
| 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 — Black Americans without health insurance coverage, approximately | 1 in 10 |
| United States benchmark — Black Americans covered by Medicaid, approximately — and about one in three Black children | 1 in 5 |
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; U.S. Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (Current Population 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.