Black Belt in the American South. Southern counties with at least 30% African-American population in 2000. 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.
How many counties are in the black belt?
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.
What is the black belt in geography?
The Black Belt. In the 1820s and 30s, the Black Belt identified a strip of rich, dark, cotton-growing dirt drawing immigrants primarily from Georgia and the Carolinas in an epidemic of " Alabama Fever .". Following the forced removal of Native Americans, the Black Belt emerged as the core of a rapidly expanding plantation area.
What is the population of the black belt in Alabama?
Alabama 2016 presidential election by county, Donald Trump in red, Hillary Clinton in blue. As of the 2000 census, Alabama's 18-county Black Belt region had a population of 589,041 (13.25% of the state's total population). There were 226,191 households and 153,357 families residing within the region.
Where is the black belt in Mississippi?
The Black Belt is a subdivision of the East Gulf Coastal Plain physiogeographic province. It forms a cresentic region extending from McNary County in extreme southern Tennessee, south through east-central Mississippi and east to Russell County, Alabama near the Georgia state line.
Why is Alabama called the Black Belt?
The Black Belt is a region of the U.S. state of Alabama. The term originally referred to the region's rich, black topsoil, much of it in the soil order Vertisols.
What counties are in the Black Belt?
Three Black Belt counties—Hale, Choctaw, and Wilcox—are ranked among the top five producers of primary timber products. Alabama's modern Black Belt region, and the Southern Black Belt in general, continue to be defined by the legacy of slavery and the plantation agriculture system.
What does being a Black Belt mean?
Being a black belt means many things. It means dedication, hard work, friendship and accomplishment. It is showing dedication to classes every week, which is hard when you play sports and have tests at school.
Does the Black Belt still exist?
Today, more than 80 percent of rural black Americans live in the states that form the Black Belt. Black men in the region routinely have mortality rates 50 percent higher than the national average. In 1860, when 76.5 percent of the people in Greene County were enslaved, the entire population totaled more than 30,000.
Why is a Black Belt important?
What does a black belt signify? A black belt holds great significance. The student who has earned a black belt has combined both physical strength and mental determination to overcome difficulties. A practitioner who holds a black belt has demonstrated years of discipline, hard work and perseverance.
What states are in the Black Belt?
AlabamaBlack Belt / State
Is black belt a big deal?
Similar to someone who became the valedictorian of their high school graduating class. The big deal about becoming a black belt is the dedication and hard work that the student puts into his or her training, culminates with an accolade very few people have ever achieved.
Is a black belt the highest?
As stated above, the black belt has been generally accepted as the highest-ranked belt, but for some martial arts, some other colors have been placed above the black belt when someone attains a very high grade. In Judo and Karate, a red and white belt is usually worn by a sixth dan.
How many black belts are there?
The belt ranking system then goes to Yellow, Green, Blue, Brown, Hi-Brown, and then 1st Degree Black Belt. There are Nine degrees of Black Belt. Although reaching the rank of Black Belt is quite an accomplishment, it is only the beginning.
What is the deep south in America?
Definition of the Deep South : the states in the most southern and eastern part of the U.S. and especially Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
What's considered Deep South?
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."
What is the Black Belt in Chicago?
The Black Belt of Chicago was the chain of neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago where three-quarters of the city's African-American population lived by the mid-20th century.
What is the black belt?
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 ...
Where is the heart of the Black Belt?
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!
What was the dominant agricultural system in the Black Belt?
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 work animals, while the sharecroppers provided no capital and paid fees with crops. 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.
What percentage of the population in the Southern United States was black in 1980?
In 1980, Southern counties with at least 25 percent African-American populations comprised 29 percent of the Southern United States ' population, falling to 23 percent in 2005. The white population in the same counties fell from 23 percent to 17 percent.
Who studied the black belt?
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.
How many counties are there in Alabama?
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.
How many counties are there in the Black Belt?
Counties. The list of counties comprising the Black Belt is often dependent on the context but historically includes 18 counties: Clarke, Conecuh, Escambia, Monroe, and Washington counties are sometimes included in the region, but are usually considered part of Alabama's southern coastal plain.
Where is the Black Belt located?
The physical geography of the "Black Belt," as related to the history of this cotton-dependent region, refers to a much larger region of the Southern United States, stretching from Delaware to Texas but centered on the Black Belt of uplands areas of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. In the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, the white elite ...
What is the black belt in Alabama?
Counties highlighted in pink are sometimes considered part of the region. The Black Belt is a region of the U.S. state of Alabama. The term originally referred to the region's rich, black topsoil, ...
Why did African Americans leave Alabama?
To escape lynchings and social oppression, and after the boll weevil and increased mechanization of agriculture, thousands of African Americans left Alabama to go to industrial cities of the North and Midwest in the Great Migration of the first half of the 20th century.
Why is Alabama a blue belt?
In electoral maps of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the Black Belt has appeared as a "Blue Belt" because of the voters' strong support for the Democratic Party. With the exception of parts of the city of Birmingham, the outline of Alabama's 7th congressional district roughly matches the western Black Belt region.
Why did the early settlers not farm in the Black Belt?
Lacking a reliable source of water, the earliest settlers avoided farming the black soil in the belt until the discovery that deep artesian wells could be drilled to supply water for people, livestock, and crops.
What was the capital of the Black Belt?
The Black Belt's largest city, Montgomery, was designated as the capital of Alabama in 1846. Because Alabama was geographically central to the slave states, Montgomery was also designated as the original capital of the Confederate States of America. The region's distance from the front lines during the American Civil War saved it from much ...
What is the black belt?
The Black Belt is a subdivision of the East Gulf Coastal Plain physiogeographic province. It forms a cresentic region extending from McNary County in extreme southern Tennessee, south through east-central Mississippi and east to Russell County, Alabama near the Georgia state line. The region is approximately 310 miles long and up to 25 miles wide, ...
What are the three major communities in the Black Belt?
The Black Belt contains three major plant communities: open prairie, chalk outcrop, and forest. The open prairie habitat includes several endemic and rare species of plants and insects. In addition many species are disjunct from Great Plains. This suggests that a grassland corridor connected the two in the past.
How big were the prairies in the Black Belt?
Although the prairies found in this area were not nearly the size of those found in the the Mid-west, these prairies were still quite large, covering at least 71630 hectares (17700 acres) in the Black Belt physiogeographic region. (Pers, comm., John Barone.).
What is the name of the star in the Black Belt?
Liatris aspera, one of several species of blazing star found. in the Black Belt region. The flora of the Black Belt Prairie is usually dominated by little bluestem ( Andropogon scoparius Michaux), as well as many other species of grasses and herbaceous plants that are characteristic of the Great Plains ( Black Belt Prairie Plant List ).
How much of the Black Belt's open prairie habitat is intact?
However, due to the regions fertile soil, much of the prairie has been lost to agriculture and has been reduced to small remnants, and it is estimated that less than 1% of the Black Belt's open prairie habitat remain intact.
Where is the 16th section of the Black Belt?
However, there are a few "good" quality remnants remaining. One is located near Osborn, Mississippi in Oktibbeha County, located on 16th section land.
Is there pollen in the Black Belt?
Although no pollen core samples are available from the Black Belt, a study of the macro-vertebrate fossil assemblage reveals a community of grazers, including 2 or 3 species of Equis horses (Pers. Comm., George Phillips, Curator of Paleontology, Mississippi Museum of Natural Science ). Liatris aspera, one of several species of blazing star found.
What was the Alabama Black Belt?
By the late twentieth century, the Alabama Black Belt as a region of insurgent African American aspirations made a strong claim to take over the meaning of the term from its older and other senses.
What were the towns that were a part of the Black Belt?
In the 1950s and 1960s, long-oppressed African American residents of the Alabama Black Belt, aided by Supreme Court decisions and congressional actions, transformed small towns such as Tuskegee, Marion, Selma, Hayneville, and Eutaw into scenes of some of the most critical moments of the modern American freedom struggle.
Who studied the black belt?
In his study of tenancy in two Georgia counties, Preface to Peasantry (1936), sociologist Arthur Raper understood the Black Belt as some two-hundred plantation counties "in which over half the population is Negro" lying "in a crescent from Virginia to Texas.".
Who was the first African American to describe life in the heart of the Black Belt?
In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois sought to describe African American life in the “heart of the Black Belt” by focusing, in Souls of Black Folk, upon a south Georgia county. The Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s called for the right of self-determination for a Deep South "Black Belt nation.". In his study of tenancy in two Georgia counties, ...
How did the Black Belt defeat the Populists?
Through violence, appeals to white supremacy, and massive voter fraud, the Black Belt's oligarchs defeated the 1890s challenge of the Populists and inscribed their power in a straitjacket of a state constitution that disfranchised the African American population along with many poor whites.
Overview
Further reading
• Adams, Katherine. "Du Bois, Dirt Determinism, and the Reconstruction of Global Value." American Literary History 31.4 (2019): 715–740; explores the studies of black belt history by W.E.B. DuBois.
• Alston, Lee J., and Joseph P. Ferrie. "Social Control and Labor Relations in the American South Before the Mechanization of the Cotton Harvest in the 1950s" Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (1989): 133-157 Online.
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.
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 challe…
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 c…
Quality of life
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 d…
Alabama
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 (o…
Georgia
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 …
Overview
The Black Belt is a region of the U.S. state of Alabama. The term originally referred to the region's rich, black topsoil, much of it in the soil order Vertisols. The term took on an additional meaning in the 19th century, when the region was developed for cotton plantation agriculture, in which the workers were enslaved African Americans. After the American Civil War, many freedmen stayed in the area as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, continuing to comprise a majority of the populatio…
Demographics
As of the 2000 census, Alabama's 18-county Black Belt region had a population of 589,041 (13.25% of the state's total population). There were 226,191 households and 153,357 families residing within the region.
The racial makeup of the Black Belt region was 52.24% African American (307,734 people), 45.87% White (270,175 people), 0.25% Native American (1,472 people), 0.52% Asian (3,067 people), 0.03% Pacific …
Geology
The region is underlain by a thin layer of rich, black topsoil developed atop the chalk of the Selma Group, a geologic unit dating to the Cretaceous. The soils have developed continuously at least since the Pliocene Epoch. Because the underlying chalk is nearly impermeable to groundwater, the black soils tend to dry out during the summer. The natural vegetation of the chalk belt consisted mainly of oak-hickory forest interspersed with shortgrass prairie, while the sandy ridges flankin…
History
Lacking a reliable source of water, the earliest settlers avoided farming the black soil in the belt until the discovery that deep artesian wells could be drilled to supply water for people, livestock, and crops. Beginning in the 1830s after Indian Removal, cotton plantations were developed that produced the commodity crop that became Alabama's greatest source of wealth. Before the American Civil War, these plantations were worked by thousands of African-American slaves. Th…
Counties
The list of counties comprising the Black Belt is often dependent on the context but historically includes 18 counties:
• Barbour
• Bullock
• Butler
Politics
In electoral maps of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the Black Belt has appeared as a "Blue Belt" because of the voters' strong support for the Democratic Party. With the exception of parts of the city of Birmingham, the outline of Alabama's 7th congressional district roughly matches the western Black Belt region. Terri Sewell (D) currently represents that district in the United States House of Representatives.
See also
• History of Alabama
External links
• "Black Belt Fact Book", University of Alabama Institute for Rural Health Research
• "Alabama's Black Belt", Birmingham News special report
• Black Belt Community Foundation
• Black Belt Museum affiliated with the University of West Alabama