The Black Belt is a region of the Southern United States. Although the term originally described the prairies and dark soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi,[1] it has long been used to describe a broad agricultural region in the American South characterized by a history of plantation agriculture in the 19th century and a high percentage of African Americans in the population.
As many as one million persons were originally taken there in a forced migration as enslaved laborers for the region's cotton plantations before the American Civil War. After several generations in the area, many stayed as rural workers, tenant farmers and sharecroppers after the war and Emancipation.
Because of the decline of family farms, the rural communities in the Black Belt commonly face acute poverty, rural exodus, inadequate education programs, low educational attainment, poor health care, substandard housing, and high levels of crime and unemployment. While African-American residents are disproportionately affected, these problems apply broadly to all ethnic groups in the Black Belt. The region and its boundaries have varying definitions, but it is generally considered a band through the center of the Deep South, although stretching from as far north as Delaware to as far west as eastern Texas.
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Black Belt is still used in the physiographic sense, to describe a crescent-shaped region about 300 miles (480 km) long and up to 25 miles (40 km) wide, extending from southwest Tennessee to east-central Mississippi and then east through Alabama to the border with Georgia. Before the 19th century, this region was a mosaic of prairies and oak-hickory woods.[2]
In the 1820s and 1830s, the region was identified as prime land for upland cotton plantations, made possible by the invention of the cotton gin for processing short-staple cotton. Ambitious migrant planters moved to the area in a land rush called Alabama Fever. Many brought slaves with them from the Upper South, or purchased them later in the domestic slave trade, resulting in the forced migration of an estimated one million workers.
The region became one of the cores of an expanding cotton plantation system that spread through much of the American South. Eventually, Black Belt came to describe the larger area of the South with historic ties to slave plantation agriculture and the cash crops of cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco.
After the American Civil War and Emancipation, freedmen worked on plantations generally by a system of sharecropping. The poverty of the South and decline in agricultural prices after the war caused suffering for planters and workers both. Although this had been a richly productive region, by the early 20th century, there was a general economic collapse. Among its many causes were continued depressed cotton prices, soil erosion and depletion, the boll weevil invasion and subsequent collapse of the cotton economy, and the socially repressive Jim Crow laws. What had been one of the nation's wealthiest and most politically powerful regions became one of the poorest.
The mid-20th-century push for black Americans to be protected in their constitutional civil rights equal to those of white Americans had roots in the center of the old Black Belt. Despite the successes of the civil-rights movement, the Black Belt remains one of the nation's poorest and most distressed areas.
Most of the area continues to be rural, with a diverse agricultural economy, including peanut and soybean production. There have been many changes in the social, economic, and cultural developments in the South. Millions of blacks left the Deep South from the early to the mid-20th-century in the Great Migration to northern and midwestern industrial cities for work. Some blacks have considered the Black Belt as a kind of "national territory" for African Americans within the United States. In the 1970s, some activists proposed self-determination in the area, up to and including the right to independence.[3]
There are many definitions and geographic delineations of the Black Belt. One of the earliest and most frequently cited is that of Booker T. Washington, who wrote, in his 1901 autobiography, Up from Slavery:
The term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the color 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.
In this definition, there are 96 counties with a black population percentage of more than 50%, of which 95 are distributed across the Coastal and Lowland South in a loose arc related to traditional areas of plantation agriculture.[4]
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the Black Belt in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk.
Other sources describe the Black Belt as "roughly 200 counties".[5] In 1936, prior to the greater population shift of the Second Great Migration from the 1940s to the 1960s, the sociologist Arthur Raper described the Black Belt as some 200 plantation counties with black population portions over 50%, lying "in a crescent from Virginia to Texas".[6]
In 2000, a United States Department of Agriculture report proposed creating a federal regional commission, similar to the Appalachian Regional Commission, to address the social and economic problems of the Black Belt. This politically defined region, called the Southern Black Belt, is a patchwork of 623 counties scattered throughout the South.[7][8]
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