Black Belt (U.S. Region) - History

History

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.

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, the term Black Belt was used 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 with the decline of agriculture. White Democrats continued to be part of a one-party system in the South, and in many states suffered malapportionment, with rural areas retaining political control long after demographic and economic shifts.

After regaining power in the state legislatures, at the end of the 19th century, Democrats in the former Confederate states completed disfranchising most blacks and many poor whites by passing new constitutions that provided for an array of discriminatory voter registration and electoral rules. The South became a one-party region, and whites controlled all Congressional representation allocated for the full population, although in many areas, the majority could not vote. Lynchings were frequent as whites used violence to impose white supremacy, and passed Jim Crow laws establishing racial segregation in public facilities.

During the first half of the twentieth century, up until 1970, a total of 6.5 million African Americans left the South in the Great Migration, which took place in two waves. They migrated to northern and midwestern industrial cities for jobs and other opportunities. The second wave of the migration began shortly before World War II, as thousands of blacks migrated to the West Coast for jobs related to defense industries.

Because of Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement, residents of the old Black Belt became supporters of the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement, seeking protection for exercise of their constitutional rights as citizens. Due to the rural economies, 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. 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.