Black Belt (region of Alabama)

Black Belt (region Of Alabama)

Coordinates: 32°36′41.82″N 87°34′39.05″W / 32.6116167°N 87.5775139°W / 32.6116167; -87.5775139

The Black Belt is a region of the U.S. state of Alabama, and part of the larger Black Belt Region of the Southern United States, which stretches from Texas to Maryland. The term originally referred to the region underlain by a thin layer of rich, black topsoil developed atop the chalk of the Selma Group, a geologic unit dating to the Cretaceous Period. The soils have been developing 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 flanking the chalk belt supported pine forest.

For lack of a reliable source of water, the earliest settlers avoided farming the black soil until the discovery that deep artesian wells could be drilled to supply people, livestock, and crops. Beginning in the 1830s, cotton plantations became Alabama's greatest source of wealth. Before the American Civil War, these plantations were worked by thousands of African American slaves. The region attained the highest density of population in the state, although slaves were prevented from voting. The planters and their elected representatives of the Black Belt had political power in the state legislature that they retained after the state began to develop more urbanized areas and an industrial economy.

The Black Belt's largest city, Montgomery, became the capital of Alabama in 1846. Because Alabama was geographically central to the slave states, Montgomery was also 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 of the ravages of war. Many of the Greek Revival mansions of the 19th-century planters have survived, as have some of the plantations' slave quarters. Gaineswood in Demopolis and Magnolia Grove in Greensboro, Alabama are among those that can be visited by tourists today.

Although the infestation of the cotton crop by the boll weevil destroyed much of the plantation system around 1910–20, the lingering effects of a cotton economy remain evident. Many descendants of freed slaves continued to work as sharecroppers and laborers after emancipation. 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. African Americans make up the majority proportion of the population in most rural Black Belt counties. Today the term "Black Belt" is commonly used by scholars and the media as a demographic characterization, as well as a geologic one.

Some of the most important events of the American Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968) occurred in the Black Belt. These included Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat, which led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott; the Selma to Montgomery marches; and voter registration reform drives, focusing in Selma, Alabama, to enable African Americans to vote (see Voting Rights Act). They had been largely disfranchised after conservative white Democrats regained political power in the state in the late 19th century. Their changes to voter registration rules and electoral procedures also disfranchised many poor whites.

Today, Alabama's Black Belt includes some of the poorest counties in the United States. Along with high rates of poverty, the area is typified by declining populations, a primarily agricultural landscape with low-density settlement, high unemployment, poor access to education and medical care, substandard housing and high rates of crime.