The Black Belt in the American South is a geopolitical region comprising areas with both historical and current majority African American populations. The term for the geopolitical region comes from that of the geological formation known as the Black Belt, named for the highly fertile black soil, and the history of the region regarding slavery. Historically, the Black Belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia–North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by affluent white people and worked by primarily black people, who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. As the term applies to the sociopolitical region, it generally describes a region larger than that defined by its geology.
After 1945, a large fraction of the laborers were replaced by machinery, and they joined the Great Migration to cities of the Midwest and West. Political analysts and historians continue to use Black Belt to designate some 200 counties in the South from Virginia to Texas that have a history of majority African American population and cotton production.
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."Politics and the race question in Alabama, The Nation Sept. 20, 1894, p. 211 online
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. Booker T. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography I have often been asked to define the term "Black Belt". So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour 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.
The boundaries of the subregion depend on the exact criteria being used. Census data is used to identify rural Southern counties with a large black population in a particular year. Which percentage and which year depends on the goals of the project—to look at history, or at current patterns, or to project future trends. In 1980, Southern counties with at least 25% African American populations comprised 29% of the Southern United States' population, falling to 23% in 2005. The white population in the same counties fell from 23% to 17%. In total numbers, these counties included 6,700,000 blacks in 1980, and 8,400,000 in 2005. They included 10,700,000 whites in 1980 and 11,700,000 in 2005.Dale W. Wimberley, "Quality of Life Trends in the Southern Black Belt, 1980–2005: A Research Note*", Journal of Rural Social Sciences 25.1 (2010) pp. 108, 109. The book by sociologist Howard W. Odum Southern Regions of the United States (1936) pulled together a wide variety of facts and figures about the Southeast. This book was heavily used by government administrators and regional planners as well as scholars.For an online copy that can be downoaded see online In 1936, sociologist Arthur Raper described the Black Belt as some 200 plantation counties where blacks represented more than 50% of the population, lying "in a crescent from Virginia to Texas".Arthur Raper, "The Black Belt", Southern Spaces, 2004 Black population decreased in some areas after the Second Great Migration, when 4.5 million rural blacks left the region from 1940 to 1970. But the University of Alabama in 2007 classifies "roughly 200 counties" as comprising the Black Belt, with significant black populations. The Mississippi Encyclopedia adds to this definition a long history of cotton production.
Political activists and historians continue to use Black Belt in considering politics in predominantly black rural areas in the South. For example, in 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote of his "People to People" tour through the Black Belt of Virginia: "The idea of 'massive resistance' was spawned not in Georgia or Alabama—but in the hearts of the Southside Virginia, commonly known as the Black Belt."
In 1964, King met with black leaders in to find a target locale to publicize the civil rights movement in Alabama. Large cities were eliminated, so according to historian Charles S. Aiken, "King had only the state's small nonmetropolitan cities from which to select the place to focus the campaign for new voting rights legislation.... There was no other choice but the "open spaces" of the Black Belt, and in the Black Belt there was no alternative to Selma."Charles S. Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War (1998) online p. 215. In 2012, political scientist Seth McKee concluded that in the 1964 election, "Once again, the high level of support for Goldwater in the Deep South, and especially their Black Belt counties [where most blacks were still disenfranchised], spoke to the enduring significance of white resistance to black progress."
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 challenges were building beneath the surface. Behind their show of unity, the Democratic Redeemers suffered deep divisions. Conflicts between upcountry and Black Belt, between town and country, and between former Democrats and former Whigs divided the Redeemers. The Democratic party proved too small to contain the ambitions of all the white men who sought its rewards, too large and unwieldy to move decisively.
During the period of disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era, mainly the years 1890–1907, white Democrats passed new state constitutions and state laws, and used informal local practices across the South to prevent African American citizens from registering to vote and voting. States became one-party Democratic bastions in which the general election was a formality. The real battles took place inside the Democratic Party primaries, which were made private by law and not open to blacks. The result was to thwart the objective of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which sought to protect the suffrage of freedmen after the American Civil War. Congress did not object, and the Supreme Court generally approved.Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (2001).
The mostly black Republican Party of the South rarely won any Black Belt elections after 1900, but it did send delegates to the presidential nominating conventions every four years, thus giving blacks some voice in national politics. President William Howard Taft used black Southern support to defeat ex-President Theodore Roosevelt for the GOP nomination in 1912.Geoffrey Cowan, Let the People Rule: Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of the Presidential Primary (2016) pp. 3, 74, 81, 83, 163–69.Lewis L. Gould, "Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Disputed Delegates in 1912: Texas as a Test Case," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 80.1 (1976): 33–56 online.George N. Green, "Republicans, Bull Moose, and Negroes in Florida, 1912," Florida Historical Quarterly 43.2 (1964): 153–164 online
After 1900, African Americans, the majority of the population in most of the Black Belt, were rarely allowed to vote, apart from a few ministers, businessmen and schoolteachers. Political power was in the hands of a relatively closed white elite comprising the major landowners, along with local merchants and bankers. They had almost complete control of local government. They generally also had control of the state legislatures, which gerrymandered political districts to strongly favor rural areas and under-represent the cities.V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949) pp. 513-17.
By the 1950s, many counties had a local Citizens' Council (the groups were commonly referred to as the "White Citizens' Councils"), which was part an associated network of white supremacist, extreme right organizations that directed white resistance to racial integration, especially against integrating the public schools.Stephanie R. Rolph, Resisting Equality: The Citizens' Council, 1954–1989 (2018) focuses on Mississippi.
Federal intervention changed the situation in the 1970s. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was strictly enforced, to expand the franchise. During the 1960s, the US Supreme Court ruled in several cases covering rural bias in legislatures, saying that under the Equal Protection Clause, states needed to redistrict based on the principle of one man, one vote for equitable representation. As a result, states were prohibited from having bicameral legislatures in which one house was elected by county. In addition, the Court required the states to redistrict every decade to reflect census data, which many had neglected to conduct. The result was to shift political power toward the more populated and industrialized urban areas.
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.Robert Higgs, "Patterns of Farm Rental in the Georgia Cotton Belt, 1880–1900." Journal of Economic History 34.2 (1974): p. 468 Online. 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.
The early 1920s were especially difficult financially in cotton growing regions. The boll weevil, a beetle that feeds on cotton buds and flowers, had migrated into the United States from Mexico in the late 19th century and had infested all U.S. cotton-growing areas by the 1920s, devastating the industry and the people working in the American South. The price of cotton plunged from 37 cents per pound in early 1920 to 10 cents in mid-1921."Cotton Prices in the World Wars" Monthly Review (March 1944) pp 2-3. Land prices plunged 80% and tax rates went up.Arthur Raper, Preface to Peasantry (1936), pp 212-213. Tenants could not repay the storekeepers. Land owners were squeezed, for many had used credit to buy land during the World War bubble; and many farms were foreclosed—all this before the Great Depression struck in 1929. Raper's analysis of Black Belt banks shows that deposits plunged by half or more from 1918 to 1932. As a result, most local people became "very shy of banks." New Deal agricultural programs helped the land owners much more than the tenants.Raper, Preface to Peasantry (1936) pp 205–207, 278–79; quote on p 279.Mary Summers, "The New Deal farm programs: looking for reconstruction in American agriculture." Agricultural History 74.2 (2000): 241–257 online.Theodore Saloutos, "New Deal agricultural policy: an evaluation." Journal of American History 61.2 (1974): 394–416 online.