Approximate geographic definition of the Deep South and the greater Southern United States.
The Deep South is consistently thought to include most or all of the
states shown in red and extend into portions of those in orange. While
the Census Bureau considers those in yellow to be part of the South, they are not typically attached to the Deep South geographic label.
Deep South
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|---|---|
Cultural region of the United States
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| Country |  United States |
| States |  Alabama  Florida  Georgia (U.S. state)  Louisiana  Mississippi  South Carolina  Texas |
The Deep South is a cultural and geographic subregion in the Southern United States. Historically, it was differentiated as those states most dependent on plantations and slave societies during the pre-Civil War period. The Deep South is commonly referred to as the Cotton States, given that the production of cotton was a primary cash crop.
Usage
Geographic range of the Black Belt
The term "Deep South" is defined in a variety of ways:
- Most definitions include the states Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
- Texas and Florida are sometimes included, due to being peripheral states, having coastlines with the Gulf of Mexico, their history of slavery and as 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 a part of the Deep South region, typically that area north of Ocala.
- Arkansas is sometimes included or else considered "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, and who 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 held the largest number of slaves. Ultimately the Confederacy included eleven states.
- A large part of the original "Cotton Belt". This was considered to extend from eastern North Carolina to South Carolina and through the Gulf States as far west as East Texas, and including those parts of western Tennessee and eastern Arkansas in the Mississippi embayment. Some of this is coterminous with the Black Belt, originally referring to upland areas of Alabama and Mississippi with fertile soil, which were developed for cotton under slave labor. The term came to be used for much of the Cotton Belt, which had a high percentage of African-American slave labor.
Origins
Though
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. Up until that time, "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 Georgia, southern
Alabama, northern Florida, Mississippi, north Louisiana, southern
Arkansas and East Texas, all historic 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, and often taking
in bordering areas of East Texas and North Florida.
In its broadest application today, 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".
Major cities and urban areas
The Deep South is home to eight combined statistical areas
(CSAs) with populations exceeding 1,000,000 residents, although the
inclusion of these cities and exclusion of others is subject to varying
geographic definitions of the region. Atlanta, with the nint eleventh largest CSAs in the United States, is the Deep South's largest population center by far.
Metropolitan areas
Metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 people:
- Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land, TX CSA
- Atlanta–Athens–Clarke–Sandy Springs, GA CSA
- Birmingham–Hoover–Talladega, AL CSA
- Jacksonville-St. Marys-Palatka, FL-GA CSA
- New Orleans–Metarie–Hammond, LA–MS CSA
- Memphis–Forrest City, TN–MS–CSA
- Greenville–Spartanburg–Anderson, SC CSA
| Rank | City | State | City (2017) | MSA (2017) | CSA (2017) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Atlanta | Georgia | 486,290 | 5,884,736 | 6,555,956 |
| 4 | Jacksonville | Florida | 892,062 | 1,504,980 | 1,631,488 |
| 5 | Memphis | Tennessee | 652,236 | 1,348,260 | 1,510,162 |
| 6 | New Orleans | Louisiana | 393,292 | 1,275,762 | 1,459,766 |
| 7 | Birmingham | Alabama | 210,710 | 1,149,807 | 1,374,190 |
| 8 | Greenville | South Carolina | 68,219 | 895,923 | 1,364,062 |
People
2000 Census Population Ancestry Map, with African-American ancestry in purple.
In the 1980 census, of those 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 in 1980, the 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 3,009,484 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.
- 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 of English with other ancestry, made
up an even larger portion of southerners.
South Carolina was settled earlier than those states commonly
classified as the Deep South. Its population in 1980 included 578,338
people out of 1,706,966 people in the state who identified as "English"
only, making them 33.88% of the total population, the largest national
ancestry group by a large 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 colonial English and others from the British Isles,
French, Germans and later Italians. Those who are African-descended
tended to identify as African American, although many of historically multiracial families also have ancestors of British Isles or Northern European ancestry.
As of 2003, the majority of African-descended Americans in the South live in the Black Belt counties.
Politics
From
the 1870s to the early 1960s, conservative whites of the Deep South held
control of state governments and overwhelmingly identified as and
supported the old version of the Democratic Party.
The most powerful leaders belonged to the party's
moderate-to-conservative wing. The Republicans also controlled many
mountain districts on the fringe of the Deep South.
At the turn of the 20th century, all of the 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 laws to impose white supremacy and Jim Crow, including racial 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 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 represented only the
richer subset of their white populations.
Major demographic changes ensued in the 20th century; during the two waves of the Great Migration,
a total of six million African Americans left the South for the
Northeast, Midwest, and West in order to escape the oppression and
violence in the South. In some areas, white migration increased into the
South, especially dating from the late 20th century. 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 Republicans. They still voted for many Democrats at the
state and local level into the 1990s.
The Republican Party in the South had been crippled by the
disenfranchisement of blacks, and the national party was unable to
relieve their injustices in the South. 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 ninety percent of African Americans in the South
and the rest of the nation have voted for the Democratic Party, including 93 percent for Obama in 2012 and 88 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
White southern voters consistently voted for the Democratic Party for many years, in order to hold onto Jim Crow Laws. Once Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power in 1932, however, the limited southern electorate found itself supporting Democratic candidates who frequently did not share its views.
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. (Yglesias 2007)
One opinion piece attributed 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 Southern voters have voted for Republican candidates in every presidential election except in 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, and the 1996 election when the incumbent president Clinton again won Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas. 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 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 2008 Republican primaries, losing only one state (South Carolina) while running (he had dropped out of the race before the Mississippi primary).
