State Plates
The Wyoming Income Plate
In Wyoming, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black Wyoming in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and Wyoming's own 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
In Wyoming, 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 Wyoming's households stand.
The income figures take their local meaning in Wyoming, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. 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 benchmark's work is location, not rank: it fixes where Wyoming stands so the plate can be read.
The income figures take their local meaning in Wyoming, 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 Wyoming 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 Wyoming; the benchmark rows are the published national figures, labeled as benchmarks. In Wyoming, 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 Wyoming, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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. Wyoming's own rows, tabled below, are where this general material becomes a specific place.
For Wyoming, the national benchmark is a yardstick, not a description; the description is the state's own distribution, tabled below. 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. It is in the rows below — Wyoming's own — that the general material becomes a specific place.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, Wyoming'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 Wyoming's 12,000 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 Wyoming as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In Wyoming, 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 Wyoming, 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 Wyoming Income plate is one page of it.
The atlas gives this subject its own plate — The Wyoming Income Plate — because the published record supports one. 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. The material is asked only for what it can state, and nothing beyond it is claimed for Wyoming.
| 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 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.