The median income for African-Americans among the 50 states is highest in Maryland, second highest in Delaware and third highest in Virginia. The flip side of the coin is that the counties with the lowest African-American poverty rates are overwhelmingly clustered in the Mid-Atlantic, as can be seen in the map above. What’s going on? What’s so special about the Mid-Atlantic?
One obvious explanation is that the high median African-American incomes are centered on the Washington metropolitan area. That may be a factor but there’s more. African-American prosperity extends southward well past the Richmond metropolitan area and north into Delaware.
The data comes from Hamilton Lombard with the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia, who published on the StatChat blog. In a future post, he says, he will examine how that came to be. I eagerly await his analysis.
(Hat tip: Frank Muraca, Nutshell.)
— JAB
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