what was the alabama black belt of 1816

Full Answer

What is the black belt of Alabama?

Traditional Counties of the Alabama 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 ."

What is the history of the black belt?

The region's identity is rooted in both its physical and cultural geography and its historical development. During the twentieth century, Alabama's Black Belt became a hotbed of activity for the civil rights movement in the South. In Macon County, Tuskegee Airmen trained at Tuskegee Army Airfield from 1941 through 1946.

What is the Mississippi black belt known for?

The Mississippi Black Belt is part of a larger region, stretching from Virginia south to the Carolinas and west through the Deep South, defined by a majority African American population and a long history of cotton production. ^ Washington, Booker T. (1901).

What is the 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.

Why is Alabama known as 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 was 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.

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.

What were the Black Belt states?

AlabamaBlack Belt / State

What do Alabama's black belt counties have in common?

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. Its characteristics include low taxes on property, high rates of poverty and unemployment, low-achieving schools, and high rates of out-migration.

How many levels of black belt 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.

When was the Alabama fever?

1817"Alabama Fever," an expression in use by 1817, referred to the frenzy to establish land claims in the area formerly known as West Florida or East Mississippi, which resulted in the admission of Alabama as a state by 1819.

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.

How many Black Belt counties are in Alabama?

The Black Belt Action Commission was created by Governor Bob Riley via Executive Order in 2004. Riley's Governor's Commission for Action in Alabama's Black Belt targeted 12 counties: Bullock, Choctaw, Dallas, Greene, Hale, Lowndes, Macon, Marengo, Perry, Pickens, Sumter, and Wilcox.

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 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 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 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.

What did the white planters do in the cotton era?

The white planters and their elected representatives of the Black Belt established political power in the state legislature in the cotton era; the white rural elite retained their dominance long after the state began to develop more urbanized areas and an industrial economy.

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.

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 of Alabama?

Depending on the criteria employed to characterize the area, the Black Belt of Alabama, named for its dark, rich soils, contains roughly between 12 and 21 counties in the central part of the state. Geographically, Alabama's Black Belt is part of a larger crescent-shaped area known as the Southern Black Belt, which extends from Maryland to Texas.

Where is the Black Belt located?

The crescent-shaped Black Belt stretches across the mid-section of Alabama from the Chattahoochee River in the east westward to Mississippi. The uppermost part of the East Gulf Coastal Plain, one of the state's five physiographic sections, forms the northern boundary of Alabama's Black Belt.

What was the Lowndes County Freedom Organization?

And the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (later the Black Panther Party) was an outgrowth of that march. Cultural geographers divide Alabama into two cultural areas. The first, the Midland traditional culture region, extends across the state from just above the Blackland Prairie north to the Tennessee border.

How many farms were there in Alabama in 1950?

In 1950, Alabama had approximately 200,000 farms. By 2002, the number of reported farms had dropped to roughly 45,000.

What is the name of the ridge in Alabama?

Black Prairie. At the heart of Alabama's Black Belt is the Ripley cuesta , a ridge with a steep north face and gentle, sloping southern face. This feature is known locally as the Chunnennuggee after the Bullock County ridge formation of the same name.

What crops did the Black Belt farmers produce?

Today, Black Belt farmers, like their counterparts in other areas, produce cattle, corn, cotton, eggs, poultry, peanuts, pigs, soybeans, wheat, hay, and timber.

What was the cause of the Great Migration in Alabama?

The Great Migration in Alabama, in part, was driven by declines in economic opportunity within the Black Belt brought on by mechanization of farming and a steady decline in cotton agriculture. In addition, the rise of the coal and steel industry sparked economic growth and opportunities outside of the region.

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.

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, ...

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.

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.

When did Alabama join the Confederacy?

Pro-slavery secessionist sentiment in the Black Belt led Alabama into the Confederacy in 1861 . Briefly, following emancipation and the South's military defeat, African Americans first went to the state's polls in 1867 and held a variety of local, state, and national political offices. With the mid-1870s however, came the restoration of white rule.

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.".

What year was the Selma to Montgomery march?

Bottom , Abernathy children on front line leading the Selma to Montgomery March with MLK, Alabama, March 25, 1965 . Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Image is in the Public Domain. The Selma to Montgomery March, now commemorated by a National Historic Trail, led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

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 ...

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 was the power of African Americans after 1900?

Political power was in the hands of a relatively closed white elite comprising the major landowners, along with local merchants and bankers.

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.

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.

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!

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.

What was the role of the Black Belt in the Civil Rights Movement?

The Black Belt region played a critical role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. Visitors can walk where history was made all across the region. Perhaps start in Selma at the Edmund Pettus Bridge or at the Selma-to-Montgomery Trail Interpretive Center Museum. In Montgomery, be sure to visit the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, and the Rosa Parks Library and Museum which depicts the early stages of the Civil Rights movement.

Where is Hank Williams's black belt?

American musical hero Hank Williams looms large in the Black Belt, from his boyhood home and museum in Georgiana to one of the world’s largest collections of Williams memorabilia in the Hank Williams Museum . The Black Belt is also home to numerous festivals that feature all kinds of music.

What was the first home in Alabama?

Visitors to Alabama’s Black Belt region can take a step back in time by visiting antebellum homes like Gaineswood in Demopolis or the Jemison-Van de Graaff Mansion, built in 1859-62. The Italianate home, built by Sen. Robert Jemison Jr. to serve as his town house, was the first home in Tuscaloosa to have a fully plumbed bathroom, and it also had a gas plant to provide fuel for lighting.

What was the first state capital of Alabama?

Today, visitors can stroll through the Old Cahawba Archaeological Park from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. daily and stop by the Visitors Center from noon until 5 p.m. Spend some time among the ruins and get a feel for early Alabama.

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…

Geology

History

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Demographics

Politics

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