Deep South

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_South

The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion of the Southern United States. The term was first used to describe the states which were most dependent on plantations and slavery prior to the American Civil War. Following the war, the region suffered economic hardship and was a major site of racial tension during and after the Reconstruction era. Before 1945, the Deep South was often referred to as the "Cotton States" since cotton was the primary cash crop for economic production. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s helped usher in a new era, sometimes referred to as the New South.

Usage

Majority-Black Counties in the U.S. as of the 2020 United States Census

The term "Deep South" is defined in a variety of ways:

• Most definitions include the following states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
• Texas, and Florida are sometimes included, due to being peripheral states, having coastlines with the Gulf of Mexico, their history of slavery, large African American populations, and being part of the historical Confederate States of America. The eastern part of Texas is the westernmost extension of the Deep South, while North Florida is also part of the Deep South region, typically the area north of Ocala.
• Tennessee, particularly West Tennessee, is sometimes included due to its history of slavery, its prominence in cotton production during the antebellum period, and cultural similarity to the Mississippi Delta region.
• Arkansas is sometimes included or considered to be "in the peripheral" or Rim South rather than the Deep South.
• The seven states that seceded from the United States before the firing on Fort Sumter and the start of the American Civil War, which originally formed the Confederate States of America. In order of secession, they are South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The first six states to secede were those that, percentage-wise, held the largest number of slaves. Ultimately, the Confederacy included eleven states.
• A large part of the original "Cotton Belt" is sometimes included in Deep South terminology. This was considered to extend from eastern North Carolina to Georgia, through the Gulf States as far west as East Texas, including West Tennessee, eastern Arkansas, and up the Mississippi embayment.
• The inner core of the Deep South, characterized by very rich black soil that supported cotton plantations, is a geological formation known as the Black Belt. The Black Belt has since become better known as a sociocultural region; in this context it is a term used for much of the Cotton Belt, which had a high percentage of African-American slave labor.

Origins

Although often used in history books to refer to the seven states that originally formed the Confederacy, the term "Deep South" did not come into general usage until long after the Civil War ended. For at least the remainder of the 19th century, "Lower South" was the primary designation for those states. When "Deep South" first began to gain mainstream currency in print in the middle of the 20th century, it applied to the states and areas of South Carolina, Georgia, southern Alabama, northern Florida, Mississippi, northern Louisiana, West Tennessee, southern Arkansas, and eastern Texas, all historical areas of cotton plantations and slavery. This was the part of the South many considered the "most Southern."

Later, the general definition expanded to include all of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as often taking in bordering areas of West Tennessee, East Texas and North Florida. In its broadest application, the Deep South is considered to be "an area roughly coextensive with the old cotton belt, from eastern North Carolina through South Carolina, west into East Texas, with extensions north and south along the Mississippi."

Early economics

After the Civil War, the region was economically poor. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, a small fraction of the white population composed of wealthy landowners, merchants and bankers controlled the economy and, largely, the politics. Most white farmers were poor and had to do manual work on their farms to survive. As prices fell, farmers' work became harder and longer because of a change from largely self-sufficient farms, based on corn and pigs, to the growing of a cash crop of cotton or tobacco. Cotton cultivation took twice as many hours of work as raising corn. The farmers lost their freedom to determine what crops they would grow, ran into increasing indebtedness, and many were forced into tenancy or into working for someone else. Some out-migration occurred, especially to Texas, but over time, the population continued to grow and the farms were subdivided smaller and smaller. Growing discontent helped give rise to the Populist movement in the early 1890s. It represented a sort of class warfare, in which the poor farmers sought to gain more of an economic and political voice.

From Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement

Further information: African-American history, Racism against Black Americans, and Racism in the United States

After 1950, the region became a major epicenter of the Civil Rights Movement, including: the emergence of a young (25 year old) new pastor of a local church, Martin Luther King Jr., the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1956 Sugar Bowl Riots, the 1960 founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the 1964 Freedom Summer.

Major cities and urban areas

The Deep South has three major Metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) located solely within its boundaries, with populations exceeding 1,000,000 residents (Four including Memphis). Atlanta, the 9th largest metro area in the United States, is the Deep South's largest population center, followed by Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham.

People

2000 Census Population Ancestry Map, with African-American ancestry in purple.

In the 1980 census, of people who identified solely by one European national ancestry, most European Americans identified as being of English ancestry in every Southern state except Louisiana, where more people identified as having French ancestry. A significant number also have Irish and Scotch-Irish ancestry.

With regards to people in the Deep South who reported only a single European-American ancestry group, the 1980 census showed the following self-identification in each state in this region:

• Alabama – 857,864 persons out of a total of 2,165,653 people in the state identified as "English," making them 41% of the state and the largest national ancestry group at the time by a wide margin.
• Georgia – 1,132,184 out of 3,009,486 people identified as "English," making them 37.62% of the state's total.
• Mississippi – 496,481 people out of 1,551,364 people identified as "English," making them 32.00% of the total, the largest national group by a wide margin.
• Florida – 1,132,033 people out of 5,159,967 identified "English" as their only ancestry group, making them 21.94% of the total.
• Louisiana – 440,558 people out of 2,319,259 people identified only as "English," making them 19.00% of the total people and the second-largest ancestry group in the state at the time. Those who wrote only "French" were 480,711 people out of 2,319,259 people, or 20.73% of the total state population.
• South Carolina – 578,338 people out of 1,706,966 identified as "English," making them 33.88% of the total at the time.
• Texas – 1,639,322 people identified as "English" only out of a total of 7,859,393 people, making them 20.86% of the total people in the state and the largest ancestry group by a large margin.

These figures do not take into account people who identified as "English" and another ancestry group. When the two were added together, people who self-identified as being English with other ancestry, made up an even larger portion of southerners. South Carolina was settled earlier than other states commonly classified as the Deep South. Its population in 1980 included 578,338 people out of 1,706,966 people, who identified as "English" only, making them 33.88% of the total population, the largest national ancestry group by a wide margin.

The map to the right was prepared by the Census Bureau from the 2000 census; it shows the predominant ancestry in each county as self-identified by residents themselves. Note: The Census said that areas with the largest "American"-identified ancestry populations, were mostly settled by descendants of English and others from the British Isles, French, Germans and later Italians. Those with African ancestry tended to identify as African American, although some African Americans also have some British or Northern European ancestors as well.

As of 2003, the majority of African-descended Americans in the South live in the Black Belt geographic area.

Hispanic and Latino Americans largely started arriving in the Deep South during the 1990s, and their numbers have grown rapidly. Politically they have not been very active.

Politics

Political expert Kevin Phillips states that, "From the end of Reconstruction until 1948, the Deep South Black Belts, where only whites could vote, were the nation's leading Democratic Party bastions."

From the late 1870s to the mid-1960s, conservative whites of the Deep South held control of state governments and overwhelmingly identified with and supported the Democratic Party. The most powerful leaders belonged to the party's moderate-to-conservative wing. The Republican Party would only control mainly mountain districts in Southern Appalachia, on the fringe of the Deep South, during the "Solid South" period.

At the turn of the 20th century, all Southern states, starting with Mississippi in 1890, passed new constitutions and other laws that effectively disenfranchised the great majority of blacks and sometimes many poor whites as well. Blacks were excluded subsequently from the political system entirely. The white Democratic-dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to impose white supremacy, including caste segregation of public facilities. In politics, the region became known for decades as the "Solid South." While this disenfranchisement was enforced, all of the states in this region were mainly one-party states dominated by white Southern Democrats. Southern representatives accrued outsized power in the Congress and the national Democratic Party, as they controlled all the seats apportioned to southern states based on total population, but only represented the richer subset of their white populations.

Major demographic changes would ensue in the 20th century. During the two waves of the Great Migration (1916–1970), a total of six million African Americans left the South for the Northeast, Midwest, and West, to escape the oppression and violence in the South. Beginning with the Goldwater–Johnson election of 1964, a significant contingent of white conservative voters in the Deep South stopped supporting national Democratic Party candidates and switched to the Republican Party. They still would vote for many Democrats at the state and local level into the 1990s. Studies of the Civil Rights Movement often highlight the region. Political scientist Seth McKee concluded that in the 1964 presidential election, "Once again, the high level of support for Goldwater in the Deep South, and especially their Black Belt counties, spoke to the enduring significance of white resistance to black progress."

White southern voters consistently voted for the Democratic Party for many years to hold onto Jim Crow Laws. Once Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1932, the limited southern electorate found itself supporting Democratic candidates who frequently did not share its views. Journalist Matthew Yglesias argues:

The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South.

Kevin Phillips states that, "Beginning in 1948, however, the white voters of the Black Belts shifted partisan gears and sought to lead the Deep South out of the Democratic Party. Upcountry, pineywoods and bayou voters felt less hostility towards the New Deal and Fair Deal economic and caste policies which agitated the Black Belts, and for another decade, they kept The Deep South in the Democratic presidential column.

Phillips emphasizes the three-way 1968 presidential election:

Wallace won very high support from Black Belt whites and no support at all from Black Belt Negroes. In the Black Belt counties of the Deep South, racial polarization was practically complete. Negroes voted for Hubert Humphrey, whites for George Wallace. GOP nominee Nixon garnered very little backing and counties where Barry Goldwater had captured 90 percent to 100 percent of the vote in 1964.

The Republican Party in the South had been crippled by the disenfranchisement of blacks, and the national party was unable to relieve their past with the South where Reconstruction was negatively viewed. During the Great Depression and the administration of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, some New Deal measures were promoted as intending to aid African Americans across the country and in the poor rural South, as well as poor whites. In the post-World War II era, Democratic Party presidents and national politicians began to support desegregation and other elements of the Civil Rights Movement, from President Harry S. Truman's desegregating the military, to John F. Kennedy's support for non-violent protests. These efforts culminated in Lyndon B. Johnson's important work in gaining Congressional approval for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since then, upwards of 90 percent of African Americans in the South have voted for the Democratic Party, including 93 percent for Obama in 2012, though this dropped to 88 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Late 20th century to present

Historian Thomas Sugrue attributes the political and cultural changes, along with the easing of racial tensions, as the reason why Southern voters began to vote for Republican national candidates, in line with their political ideology. Since then, white Deep South voters have tended to vote for Republican candidates in most presidential elections. Times the Democratic Party has won in the Deep South since the late 20th century include: the 1976 election when Georgia native Jimmy Carter received the Democratic nomination, the 1980 election when Carter won Georgia, the 1992 election when Arkansas native and former governor Bill Clinton won Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the 1996 election when the incumbent president Clinton again won Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas, and when Georgia was won by Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election.

In 1995, Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich was elected by representatives of a Republican-dominated House as Speaker of the House.

Since the 1990s the white majority has continued to shift toward Republican candidates at the state and local levels. This trend culminated in 2014 when the Republicans swept every statewide office in the Deep South region midterm elections. As a result, the Republican party came to control all the state legislatures in the region, as well as all House seats that were not representing majority-minority districts.

Presidential elections in which the Deep South diverged noticeably from the Upper South occurred in 1928, 1948, 1964, 1968, and, to a lesser extent, in 1952, 1956, 1992, and 2008. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee fared well in the Deep South in the 2008 Republican primaries, losing only one state (South Carolina) while running (he had dropped out of the race before the Mississippi primary).

In the 2020 presidential election, the state of Georgia was considered a toss-up state hinting at a possible Democratic shift in the area. It ultimately voted Democratic, in favor of Joe Biden. During the 2021 January Senate runoff elections, Georgia also voted for two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock. However, Georgia still maintains a Republican lean with a PVI rating of R+3 in line with its Deep South neighbors, with Republicans currently controlling every Georgia statewide office, its Supreme Court, and its legislature.

States

From colonial times to the early-twentieth century, much of the Lower South had a black majority. Three Southern states had populations that were majority-black: Louisiana (from 1810 until about 1890), South Carolina (until the 1920s), and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s). In the same period, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida had populations that were nearly 50% black, while Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia had black populations approaching or exceeding 40%. Texas' black population reached 30%.

The demographics of these states changed markedly from the 1890s through the 1950s, as two waves of the Great Migration led more than 6,500,000 African-Americans to abandon the economically depressed, segregated Deep South in search of better employment opportunities and living conditions, first in Northern and Midwestern industrial cities, and later west to California. One-fifth of Florida's black population had left the state by 1940, for instance. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century, scholars have documented a reverse New Great Migration of black people back to southern states, but typically to destinations in the New South, which have the best jobs and developing economies.

The District of Columbia, one of the magnets for black people during the Great Migration, was long the sole majority-minority federal jurisdiction in the continental U.S. The black proportion has declined since the 1990s due to gentrification and expanding opportunities, with many black people moving to southern states such as Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Maryland and others migrating to jobs in states of the New South in a reverse of the Great Migration.

Transportation

• U.S. Route 90 runs from Van Horn, Texas to Jacksonville, Florida.
• U.S. Route 11 runs through the Deep South to the Canadian border in New York.
• Interstate 10 is a major transcontinental east-west highway that travels through the far southern portion of the Deep South, with its eastern terminus at I-95 in Jacksonville, Florida.
• Interstate 55 is a major north-south route traveling from Chicago, Illinois to New Orleans, Louisiana. The interstate travels throught the Deep South cities of Memphis, Jackson, and New Orleans.
• Interstate 40 is a major transcontinental east-west route that travels from Barstow, California to Wilmington, North Carolina. It meets Interstate 55 in Memphis.
• Interstate 49 is an partially complete interstate running north-south centrally in the United States. It runs currently in the Deep South from Texarkana, Arkansas through Shreveport, and Alexandria to Lafayette, Louisiana.
• Interstate 20 runs from West Texas to Florence, South Carolina. It travels through the Deep South cities of Shreveport, Jackson, Birmingham, Atlanta, Augusta, and Columbia.

African-American history of agriculture in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_history_of_agriculture_in_the_United_States 

 

Black cotton farming family (c. 1890s).

 

Black cotton working convicts (1911).

 

African American farmer in corn field, Alachua County, Florida (1913)

 

Black sharecropper picking cotton (1939).

The role of African Americans in the agricultural history of the United States includes roles as the main work force when they were enslaved on cotton and tobacco plantations in the Antebellum South. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863-1865 most stayed in farming as very poor sharecroppers, who rarely owned land. They began the Great Migration to cities in the mid-20th century. About 40,000 are farmers today.

History

Eighteenth century

Plantation owners brought a mass of slaves from Africa and the Caribbean and Mexico to farm the fields during cotton harvests. Black women and children were also enslaved in the industry. The growth of Slavery in the United States is closely tied to the expansion of plantation agriculture. The contributions of enslaved people on early American agriculture has largely been discounted and ignored, mainly because of the lack of records not created by the slaveholder, often writing to justify enslavement.

However, many plantation owners relied on the agricultural knowledge that Africans brought over from across the Atlantic. Perhaps the best example of this is rice cultivation in South Carolina, relying on indigenous West African knowledge of growing Oryza glaberrima. This specific knowledge was invaluable in transforming South Carolina into a rice producing powerhouse.

While enslaved, African Americans on plantations found ways to supplement their meager food rations by cultivating slave gardens.^[5] These slave gardens were usually near the slave cabins or remote areas of the plantation, and provided slaves with three benefits: nourishment, financial independence, and medicinal uses. These slave gardens allowed enslaved people some level of autonomy and agency; when they grew more than they could consume, they were able to sell.

Nineteenth century

Antebellum South

The great majority of black farmworkers before 1865 were enslaved workers on Southern farms and plantations. Smaller numbers were free employees or farm owners. In South Carolina there were about 400 free black farmers in the rural parishes surrounding Charleston. As farmers their strategies, production, and rural lives resembled the poor white neighbors. Survival was a high priority and involved establishing economic self-sufficiency through concentration on food crops for their own families, and then by cultivating social advantages such as having a rich white patron.

Virginia had a large free black element. By 1860, there were 58,000 free Black people living in Virginia; 80 percent in rural areas. Most lived on the Eastern Shore. One out of eight Black people in the state was free and the rest were enslaved in 1860. There were severe legal restrictions and terms of nonvoting, not testifying in court, not attending schools. Newly manumitted ex-slaves had to leave the state. However the same property laws were applied, allowing free Black people to own and operated 1202 small farms in 1860. They were patronized by some wealthy white landowners, who would hire them for cash wages from time to time. They were especially needed at harvest time, and when it was necessary to replant the small tobacco plants. It was a political movement in 1853 to expel all free Black people from Virginia, but key White landowners intervened to block the proposal; they appreciated and often needed the labor of the free Black people. From the point of view of the free Black people, The small amounts of cash were useful; probably even more useful it was to be paid with old clothes, used tools, or young animals in lieu of cash wages. Above all, it was essential to their survival to be useful and available to politically powerful white neighbors.

After emancipation

After emancipation and the passage of the thirteenth amendment, Black slaves were legally freed, but most of them lacked any kind of material wealth and were thus led into other oppressive relationships. Many Black agriculturists were subjugated to land tenure agreements and working as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and within the crop-lien system. Southern black cotton farmers faced discrimination from the north. Many white Democrats were concerned about how many of African Americans were being employed in the US cotton industry and the dramatic growth of black landowners. They urged white farmers in the south to take control of the industry, which from time to time resulted in strikes by black cotton pickers; for instance Black people led by the Colored Farmer's Association (CFA) strikers from Memphis organized the Cotton pickers strike of 1891 in Lee County in September, which resulted in much violence.

Black cotton farmers were very important to entrepreneurs which emerged during industrialization in the United States, particularly Henry Ford. The United States Emancipation Proclamation came into power on January 1, 1863, allowing a "new journey for people of African ancestry to participate in the U.S. Agriculture Industry in a new way."

Sharecropping became widespread in the South during and after the Reconstruction Era.

Twentieth century

A woman and 3 young girls picking cotton in a field (1937)

The conditions for black cotton farmers gradually improved during the twentieth century. Ralph J. Bunche, an expert in Negro suffrage in the United States, observed in 1940 that "many thousands of black cotton farmers each year now go to the polls, stand in line with their white neighbors, and mark their ballots independently without protest or intimidation, in order to determine government policy toward cotton production control." However, discrimination towards Black people continued as it did in the rest of society, and isolated incidents often broke out. On 25 September 1961 Herbert Lee, a black cotton farmer and voter-registration organizer, was shot on the head by white State legislator E. H. Hurst in Liberty, Mississippi. Yet the cotton industry continued to be very important for Black people in the southern United States, much more so than for whites. By the late 1920s around two-thirds of all African-American tenants and almost three-fourths of the croppers worked on cotton farms. 3 out of every 4 black farm operators earned at least 40% of their income from cotton farming during this period. Studies conducted during the same period indicated that 2 in 3 black women from black landowning families were involved in cotton farming. In 1920, 24% (218,612) of farms in the nation were Black-operated, less than 1% (2,026) were managed by Black people, and 76% (705,070) of Black farm operators were tenants.

The cotton industry in the United States hit a crisis in the early 1920s. Cotton and tobacco prices collapsed in 1920 following overproduction and the boll weevil pest wiped out the sea island cotton crop in 1921. Annual production slumped from 1,365,000 bales in the 1910s to 801,000 in the 1920s. In South Carolina, Williamsburg County production fell from 37,000 bales in 1920 to 2,700 bales in 1922 and one farmer in McCormick County produced 65 bales in 1921 and just 6 in 1922. As a result of the devastating harvest of 1922, some 50,000 black cotton workers left South Carolina, and by the 1930s the state population had declined some 15%, largely due to cotton stagnation. However, it wasn't the collapse of prices or pests which resulted in the mass decline of African American employment in agriculture in the American south. The mechanization of agriculture is undoubtedly the most important reason why many Black people moved to northern American cities in the 1940s and 1950s during the "Great Migration" as mechanization of agriculture was introduced, leaving many unemployed. The Hopson Planting Company produced the first crop of cotton to be entirely planted, harvested and baled by machinery in 1944.

Twenty-first century

See also: Pigford v. Glickman

In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture vowed to pay some forty thousand black farmers $1.2 billion in total, as compensation for years of undue discrimination. Though funds were intended to be distributed by the end of 2012, the black farmers had yet to receive the designated remuneration by March 2013. In all, farmers in Pigford I who filed timely claims had received over $1 billion in payments. More than 60,000 farmers submitted late claim petitions in Pigford I. Late claimants in Pigford I were able to receive $1.1 billion in payments in the Pigford II claims process. 33,000 Black farmers in Pigford II received decision letters dated August 30, 2013, resulting from the late claims process that closed on May 11, 2012. About 18,000 Pigford II claims were eventually decided in favor of the farmers and 15,000 claims were denied.

As of 2012, there were 44,629 African-American farmers in the United States. The vast majority of African-American farmers were in southern states.

In 2021, the Biden Administration proposed the American Rescue Plan, which will support agriculture, and of this, $10.4 billion will be allocated to "disadvantaged" farmers; Black farmers make up a quarter of these farmers. While the plan is associated with the administration's COVID-19 stimulus relief packages, it is the first wave of relief for Black farmers since the extent of the debt-relief Pigford v. Glickman was to offer.

In popular culture

James Hopkinsons Plantation slaves planting sweet potatoes (c. 1862)

Picking cotton was often a subject which was mentioned in songs by African-American blues and jazz musicians in the 1920s–1940s, reflecting their grievances. In 1940, jazz pianist Duke Ellington composed "Cotton Tail" and blues musician Lead Belly wrote "Cotton Fields". In 1951, Big Mama Thornton wrote "Cotton Picking Blues." A number of blues and jazz musicians had worked on cotton plantations. Blues pianist Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins for instance had once been a tractor driver on a Mississippi plantation before enjoying a successful career with Muddy Waters. Lord Buckley once sang a song titled "Black Cross", pertaining to an educated black farmer murdered by a mob comprising white men.

Black Belt in the American South

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Belt_in_the_American_South 

 

Majority-Black Counties in the U.S. as of the 2020 United States Census

Black Belt in the American South
Cultural region of the United States
Country	United States
States	Alabama  Arkansas  Florida  Georgia  Louisiana  Maryland  Mississippi  North Carolina  South Carolina  Tennessee  Texas  Virginia

The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history, especially concerning slavery and black workers, of the geological region known as the Black Belt. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.

After 1945, a large fraction of the laborers were replaced by machinery, and they joined the Great Migration to cities of the Midwest and West. Political analysts and historians continue to use the term Black Belt to designate some 200 counties in the South from Virginia to Texas that have a history of majority African American population and cotton production.

Definitions

By 1894, political commentators used the term "Black Belt" so often that the term was already very well known in the United States. The Nation reported in 1894:

There are 12 counties in Alabama in each of which the blacks are twice as numerous as the whites. These 12 counties, stretching across southern Central Alabama from Georgia and Mississippi, constitute the principal portion of the famous Black Belt.

By 1900, the term "Black Belt" was commonly used to denote a geopolitical region, much like later coinages such as snow belt, rust belt, sun belt and Bible Belt. Booker T. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography

I have often been asked to define the term "Black Belt." So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.

The boundaries of the subregion depend on the exact criteria being used. Census data is used to identify rural Southern counties with a large black population in a particular year. Which percentage and which year depends on the goals of the project—to look at history, or at current patterns, or to project future trends. In 1980, Southern counties with at least 25% African American populations comprised 29% of the Southern United States' population, falling to 23% in 2005. The white population in the same counties fell from 23% to 17%. In total numbers, these counties included 6,700,000 blacks in 1980, and 8,400,000 in 2005. They included 10,700,000 whites in 1980 and 11,700,000 in 2005.

In 1936, sociologist Arthur Raper described the Black Belt as some 200 plantation counties where blacks represented more than 50% of the population, lying "in a crescent from Virginia to Texas". Black population decreased in some areas after the Second Great Migration, when 4.5 million rural blacks left the region from 1940 to 1970. But the University of Alabama in 2007 classifies "roughly 200 counties" as comprising the Black Belt, with significant black populations. The Mississippi Encyclopedia adds to this definition a long history of cotton production.

Political activists and historians continue to use "Black Belt" in considering politics in predominately black rural areas in the South. For example, in 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote of his "People to People" tour through the Black Belt of Virginia: "The idea of 'massive resistance' was spawned not in Georgia or Alabama—–but in the hearts of the Southside Virginia, commonly known as the Black Belt."

In 1964, King met with black leaders in to find a target locale to publicize the civil rights movement in Alabama. Large cities were eliminated, so according to historian Charles S. Aiken, "King had only the state's small nonmetropolitan cities from which to select the place to focus the campaign for new voting rights legislation.... There was no other choice but the "open spaces" of the Black Belt, and in the Black Belt there was no alternative to Selma." In 2012, political scientist Seth McKee concluded that in the 1964 election, "Once again, the high level of support for Goldwater in the Deep South, and especially their Black Belt counties [where most blacks were still disenfranchised], spoke to the enduring significance of white resistance to black progress."

Political power

The "Redeemers", a Southern Democratic political coalition that sought to enforce white supremacy, came to power after Reconstruction ended in 1877 and ousted Black and White Republicans from political office across the South. Historian Edward L. Ayers argues the Redeemers were sharply divided, however, and fought for control of the Democratic Party:

For the next few years the Democrats seemed in control of the South, but even then deep challenges were building beneath the surface. Behind their show of unity, the Democratic Redeemers suffered deep divisions. Conflicts between upcountry and Black Belt, between town and country, and between former Democrats and former Whigs divided the Redeemers. The Democratic party proved too small to contain the ambitions of all the white men who sought its rewards, too large and unwieldy to move decisively.

During the period of disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era, mainly the years 1890–1907, white Democrats passed new state constitutions and state laws, and used informal local practices across the South to prevent African American citizens from registering to vote and voting. States became one-party Democratic bastions in which the general election was a formality. The real battles took place inside the Democratic Party primaries, which were made private by law and not open to blacks. The result was to thwart the objective of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which sought to protect the suffrage of freedmen after the American Civil War. Congress did not object, and the Supreme Court generally approved.

The mostly black Republican Party of the South rarely won any Black Belt elections after 1900, but it did send delegates to the presidential nominating conventions every four years, thus giving blacks some voice in national politics. President William Howard Taft used black Southern support to defeat ex-President Theodore Roosevelt for the GOP nomination in 1912.

After 1900, African Americans, the majority of the population in most of the Black Belt, were rarely allowed to vote, apart from a few ministers, businessmen and schoolteachers. Political power was in the hands of a relatively closed white elite comprising the major landowners, along with local merchants and bankers. They had almost complete control of local government. They generally also had control of the state legislatures, which gerrymandered political districts to strongly favor rural areas and under-represent the cities.

By the 1950s, many counties had a local Citizens' Council (the groups were commonly referred to as the "White Citizens' Councils"), which was part an associated network of white supremacist, organizations that directed white resistance to racial integration, especially against integrating the public schools.

Federal intervention changed the situation in the 1970s. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was strictly enforced, to expand the franchise. During the 1960s, the US Supreme Court ruled in several cases covering rural bias in legislatures, saying that under the Equal Protection Clause, states needed to redistrict based on the principle of one man, one vote for equitable representation. As a result, states were prohibited from having bicameral legislatures in which one house was elected by county. In addition, the Court required the states to redistrict every decade to reflect census data, which many had neglected to conduct. The result was to shift political power toward the more populated and industrialized urban areas.

Tenant farming

Until the mid-20th century, the predominant agricultural system in the Black Belt involved interdependent white land owners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers; most of the latter groups were African Americans. Tenants typically owned their own tools and draft animals, while the sharecroppers provided no capital and paid fees to the landowner with a share of the crop produced. Very little cash changed hands. The few existing local banks were small; cash was scarce and had to be saved by the landowners for paying taxes.

The early 1920s were especially difficult financially in cotton growing regions. The boll weevil, a beetle that feeds on cotton buds and flowers, had migrated into the United States from Mexico in the late 19th century and had infested all U.S. cotton-growing areas by the 1920s, devastating the industry and the people working in the American South. The price of cotton plunged from 37 cents per pound in early 1920 to 10 cents in mid-1921. Land prices plunged 80% and tax rates went up. Tenants could not repay the storekeepers. Land owners were squeezed, for many had used credit to buy land during the World War bubble; and many farms were foreclosed—all this before the Great Depression struck in 1929. Raper's analysis of Black Belt banks shows that deposits plunged by half or more from 1918 to 1932. As a result, most local people became "very shy of banks." New Deal agricultural programs helped the land owners much more than the tenants.

Picking cotton, 1886

Landowners needed a great deal of labor at harvest time to pick cotton. The typical plan after the Civil War and emancipation of the slaves who had provided labor on vast estates in the American South during the antebellum period was for planters to divide the old plantations into many smaller farms that were then assigned to tenant farmers. The tenant farmer and his family worked their plot of land and provided the labor to plant and harvest the crop. Throughout the year, the tenants usually bought food and supplies weekly, on credit, through the local country store (sometimes owned by the planter).

At harvest time, the tenants picked and sold their cotton, paid the merchant, and gave the landowner his one-third. There seldom was much cash left over. For sharecroppers, the landlord supplied all their needs during the year and then took the crop. The annual cycle started again, often with a large turnover of sharecroppers. Landowners also worked some of the land directly, using black labor paid in cash. The white landowners held all the political power, and fought vigorously against cash-dispensing government welfare programs that would undermine the cashless system. Economic historians Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie (1999) describe the system as essentially an informal contract that bound employer and worker through the provision of housing, medical care, and other in-kind services along with cash wages. At its heart, it guaranteed a stable and adequate labor supply to the planter. Though restricted by the directives of the planter, workers in return received some measure of economic stability, including a social safety net, access to financial capital, and some physical protection in an often violent society.

United States map of the Black American population from 1900 U.S. Census

There were few alternative jobs in the Black Belt region. When factories opened or retooled to supply the war effort in World War II, and the military draft was introduced, large numbers of African American farmers left for the army or cash-paying jobs in nearby or distant cities, particularly on the West Coast. This population movement was called the Great Migration. With the beginning of the war, outbound migration increased significantly.

A decade after the end of the war, a practical combination of more efficient machinery, such as tractors and cotton harvesters and chemical herbicides finally became available to cotton planters and many landowners began farming the land themselves. Their reduced need for resident farm labor forced many tenant farmers and sharecroppers off the land resulting in an even greater black emigration to the North and West. This is known as the Second Great Migration. Diversified agriculture replaced much of the cotton and tobacco, and gradually industrial-scale agriculture became dominant in large areas of the region.

Quality of life

A map of the poverty rates in the United States by county. Areas such as the majority-black Mississippi Delta region have some of the highest poverty rates in the United States.

The rural Black Belt, with its largely African American population, has historically ranked toward the bottom of American regions in terms of quality of life indicators such as poverty rates, median incomes, mortality, unemployment rates, and educational levels. For example, since before the 1950s transportation routes have historically been inadequate in this region. To this day, air transportation facilities are limited.

Peter Daniels investigated how the government pushed back on supporting small farms and farmers and pushed more towards a climate of capitalism. Hierarchical systems were a proponent in this climate of capitalism that eroded the agricultural business. In 1913, the USDA planned to distribute payments to the farmers. The farmers felt like they were being pushed to the margin with the empty promises the FHA and Georgia government was giving them. This shows that the FHA, local, and national governments had racist motivation behind reforming the slave system and their efforts were not satisfactory. The USDA was only focusing on large and industrial farms. In turn, this would lead the small farmers (part of the Black Belt) off and out of their lands.

Salter, who worked at Tougaloo College, studied how industrialization affected black farmers. They talked about the fact that the chemical herbicides that the government had used to produce crops more quickly and of lesser quality, started to deteriorate the physical integrity of the lands. Farmers like the Salters could no longer depend on crops like cotton and seasonal crops to support their families, or sell enough to support their families. Even farmers who had more money saved before the government took over their farmlands were still in a parallel position to the lower class farmers. The family farmers and their lands were being replaced by industrial means, and their families stood no chance physically nor did their farms.

Alabama

Further information: History of Alabama and Alabama Fever

Religion

In the late 19th century, formerly enslaved African Americans in Alabama, now freedmen, were concentrated in the Black Belt, which ran across the central part of the state, mainly in Greene, Hale, Perry, Sumter, Marengo, Dallas, Wilcox, Lowndes, Montgomery, and Bullock counties. Freedmen established churches independent of white supervision, and their own Baptist state and regional associations. Baptist membership grew rapidly in the Black Belt, from a total of 71,000 in 1890 (of whom 86% were African American), to 215,000 in 1916.

White religion

The planters in the region had been affluent before the Civil War, and typically belonged to the Presbyterian, Episcopal, or Methodist churches. After the war, facing economic losses and disruption to the economy, many of the owners sold out and moved to distant cities. Presbyterian and Episcopal church membership fell. Among the whites, Methodism grew, as did Baptist congregations. In addition, new fundamentalist sects, such as Holiness and Nazarene, began to emerge, but their rapid growth came after 1900.

In the white community, Baptist church services were typically held Sundays at 11 AM and 6 PM, with an earlier Sunday school for children. During the week, there were prayer meetings and meetings of the ladies' society and missionary organizations. Smaller rural churches shared a rotating pastor and had a lighter schedule. Occasionally the Baptists would hold rallies promoting membership drives, domestic missions, Christian education, religious literature, prayer in the home, Christian citizenship, and one outside issue, laws to promote temperance. Until the late 19th century, the preachers continued to focus on the need for revivals, and Sabbath observance, on the evils of Catholicism, card playing, dancing and personal sin in general. Every few weeks the churches held trials of their own members for sins such as drunkenness, dancing, or adultery; the usual participant punishment was humiliation or expulsion from the congregation. The theology was traditional, with no trace of modernist readings of the Bible. Unlike the Methodists and Presbyterians, few Baptist pastors were educated. Instead, the local congregation selected and ordained ministers on the basis of their religiosity and ability to articulate God's word. By 1900, the range of sermons and editorials had been enlarged to cover new social themes. Baptists still opposed Catholicism, but now they talked of cooperation with other Protestant churches. There was less emphasis on card playing and dancing, and more interest in issues of underpaid laborers, coal miners, and workers in sweatshops. This indicated a newfound interest in the Social Gospel, although not nearly at the level of Northern Protestant churches. Racial tensions and discrimination was not mentioned, nor the rate of lynchings, which peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Black religion

Many, probably most, slaves had become Christians during the antebellum period. Their religious preferences focused on evangelical religion with strong participation by the congregations, and led by a strong minister who typically was also a political leader. By 1867, freedmen, with help from the Freedmen's Bureau, began organizing their own separate all-black churches. Northern Methodist missionaries helped organize such churches as were affiliated with the national Methodist Church. More popular were the African Methodist Episcopal Church and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the first independent black denominations, whose missionaries planted thousands of new churches.

White southern Methodists had a separate body, and they sponsored the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. Small numbers of African Americans belonged to the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches. All the Methodists had a hierarchical organization led by bishops.

Many blacks organized independent Baptist churches, quick to establish congregations without white supervision. At their first state convention in 1868, the 60 Baptists attending represented 32 churches. By 1881 the church had 50 district associations, 600 churches, 700 preachers, and about 90,000 members in the state, and operated a small seminary in Selma; most of the ministers were strong orators but barely literate. Although the revivalist camp meeting movement was fading away in the white churches, it grew more popular in the black community. In addition to all-day Sunday services, many Black Baptists became active in Sunday schools and missionary societies.

Sharecropping and tenant farmers

Although racial tensions often grew violent during the Reconstruction era (1863–1877), in the Alabama black belt some compromise was reached through a sharecropping system in which local black farmers were under the protection of rich white landowners. According to a review of a 2015 history of Reconstruction in Alabama:

The strength of African-American activism and, to a lesser extent, the moderation of elite planters meant that in the black belt Reconstruction essentially worked. Sharecropping developed as a compromise that allowed white planters to make money while black workers preferred its relatively greater autonomy in comparison to slavery. As a result of the labor compromise that developed, the black belt saw less terroristic white supremacist violence than did northern Alabama. Fitzgerald’s work thus adds specific teeth to the arguments of Steven Hahn—and before him, W. E. B. Du Bois —about the political acumen and solidarity of rural African Americans. White planters obviously were at the top of economic and political ladders, but black tenant farmers were real agents of power.

Georgia

Picking cotton, 1890s

Religion

William J. Northen (1835–1913), was the Governor of Georgia from 1890 to 1894. A leading Baptist minister, Northen was president of the Georgia Baptist Convention from 1892 to 1910, and president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1899 to 1901. His political rhetoric was based on his religious outlook. He often addressed racial issues at a time when the rate of lynching was growing rapidly. Northen believed that advances in medicine and health would ultimately help African Americans achieve salvation. He promoted the ideology of the modernizing New South, but did not abandon the policy of white supremacy.

Women

The study of women's history and gender roles in the Black Belt has been a recent development. Chrissy Lutz and Dawn Herd-Clark in 2019 explored the situation of black housewives in Georgia's black belt in the 1920s and 1930s. They worked with outside agencies to improve their own work efficiency and economic opportunities. Fort Valley State College, a historically black college, collaborated with the segregated unit of the Cooperative Extension Service, an educational arm of the United States Department of Agriculture. They trained and supplied black organizers, set up and funded local clubs, and gave farm and home demonstrations. They focused on the integral domestic work of cooking, hygiene, sewing, garden cultivation and food processing, and poultry raising. Not only did they teach new skills, they helped isolated rural women to meet each other and form supportive friendships. The systematic end of rural isolation meant that black rural women could affirm that "no one was on their own."

Collapse of the Black belt plantation system

Further information: Plantation economy, Jim Crow economy, and Black land loss in the United States

Economic historians of the South generally emphasize the continuity of the system of white supremacy and cotton plantations in the Black Belt from the late colonial era into the mid-20th century, when it collapsed. Harold D. Woodman summarizes the external forces that caused this disintegration from the 1920s to the 1970s:

When significant change finally occurred, its impetus came from outside the South. Depression-bred New Deal reforms, war-induced demand for labor in the North, perfection of cotton-picking machinery, and civil rights legislation and court decisions finally...destroyed the plantation system, undermined landlord or merchant hegemony, diversified agriculture and transformed it from a labor- to a capital-intensive industry, and ended the legal and extralegal support for racism. The discontinuity that war, invasion, military occupation, the confiscation of slave property, and state and national legislation failed to bring in the mid nineteenth century finally arrived in the second third of the twentieth century.

Historiography and memory

W. E. B. DuBois

The most prominent analyst of the Black Belt was sociologist W. E. B. DuBois, who engaged in statistically based studies of family life, economic cooperation, and social conditions as editor of The Atlantic University Publications in the early 20th century. His 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk contains extensive analysis and reflection. Du Bois calls Albany, Georgia, in Dougherty County, the "heart of the Black Belt". He says: "Here are the remnants of the vast plantations."

How curious a land is this,- how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise!

Yet, he notes, it is not far from "where Sam Hose was crucified" [in a lynching], "to-day the centre of the Negro problem,-the centre of those nine million men who are America's dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade." He continues: "Careless ignorance and laziness here, fierce hate and vindictiveness there,—these are the extremes of the Negro problem which we met that day, and we scarce knew which we preferred."

Restoration of old dwellings

The civil rights movement and related changes in the production of history of African Americans raised new interest in elements of their history in the South, including during slavery times. Since the late 20th century, there has been a new emphasis on the restoration, preservation and historical analysis of African American dwelling units in the Black Belt, especially those surviving from slavery days. Ashley A. Dumas, et al. explain the rationale:

Slave houses are artifacts. Their attributes can be recorded, analyzed, and broad patterns about their historical context, their builders, and inhabitants revealed. The methods of construction, for instance, often indicate climate, economy, and available technology. Ethnographic and archaeological studies demonstrate that houses, yards, and landscapes reflect cultural values and social relationships and changes to these. The organization of labor may be inferred from the placement of houses in relation to one another and to non-domestic buildings.

In certain areas of what was once the Black Belt, citizens began to honor the events that took place there.

In Selma, Alabama there is the Central Loop located in the heart of the city, which is rich in the Black Belt history. The Civil War Battle of Selma and the Voting Rights era were the heart of Selma's history. One attraction of Selma is the Edmund Pettus Bridge. This bridge gained widespread popularity when activists marched pridefully from Selma to Montgomery in opposition to discrimination against African Americans. Law enforcement came in and forcefully handled the protesters, with tear gas and physically assaulting the protesters. This showed the injustice and discrimination that the African Americans faced when they were just trying to fight for their rights. These events are now on TV for everyone to witness, and are termed “Bloody Sunday”.

Led by Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, the Voting Rights emerged. The people involved in the Voting Rights arranged the First Baptist Church. This church was used as a vehicle to give food, clothes, and supplies to fellow Voting Rights activists. The building where King spoke out against the discrimination that the African Americans were bearing, the church was destroyed in 1894 by law enforcement. In 1982, it was rebuilt as a historic site. It is the initial point where people go to start the Martin Luther King Jr. Street Historic Tour.

To honor one of the martyrs of the civil rights area, the Interpretive Center was constructed as part of the historic tour. The Interpretive Center replicates how the Kings lived, with replicas of furniture, paintings, and household items which the Kings had in their house during the time. Additionally, there is a film shown during the tour that is called, “Here I stand”. It is a reenactment of how the King's house was bombed during the boycott.

Industrialization in small farming production was a mark of the history of the Black Belt. In Auburn, there were 1116 acres of land that were contaminated with fescue toxicity and were fed to cattle. This was just one of the 5 stations that were poisoned with toxic pesticides and fed cattle toxins to produce a higher quantity of food. Now, the plots have been transformed into the Black Belt Research and Experimentation Center. Auburn University used the lands that were filled with toxins to study how to manage fungus-infected pesticides and helped contribute to her beef production in the US. This area is used by students at Auburn for research but also is open for visitors to see the progression of farming in the Black Belt.

The Tuskegee Institution National Historic Site: Carver Museum pays homage to Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Each of these men worked to reform the agriculture system that was negatively transformed by discrimination and racism. When the African Americans were pushed out of their righteous land, the Tuskegee Institute was founded by Washington in 1881. This institution helped to educate African Americans about how to farm, their legal land rights, and the financial managerial aspect of farming.

The Carver Museum honors the professor and activist who worked tirelessly to transform Southern agriculture. The museum holds original photographs, physical objects that were used during the time, and live reenactments.

In 1939, the U.S. government let African Americans train to be airmen in the U.S. military. Civil pilot training was enacted and took place at the Tuskegee Institute. The men learned how to fly and navigate a plane, combat weather, and climate issues, and engineer the plans. When the U.S. had entered World War II, the airmen began to report for duty. Now termed the "Tuskegee Experiment", 992 pilots and 10,000 people of staff had more to fight against than the white airmen who were trained to fight the enemy overseas. The black airmen who had parallel trading to the white airmen had to suffer through the racist climate in the South and the segregation in the U.S. surrounding them.

To honor this in 1988, President Bill Clinton passed a law that instituted the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site at Norton Field.