BLACK BELT (U.S. REGION)

The 'Black Belt' is the name of a region of the United States. Originally referring to the prairies and dark soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi, the term has long been used for a broad region in the American South characterized by a high population percentage of African Americans, acute poverty, rural decline, inadequate education programs, low educational attainment, poor health care, substandard housing, and high levels of crime and unemployment. While African Americans are particularly affected, these problems apply to the general population of the region. There are various definitions of the region, but in general it is a belt-like band through the center of the Deep South, stretching north through Virginia and west at least as far as Louisiana and Arkansas.

Contents

History

Definitions

See also

References

Further reading

External links

History

The term "Black Belt" is still used in the physiographic sense, describing a crescent-shaped region about 300 miles long and up to 25 miles wide, extending from southwest Tennessee to east-central Mississippi and then east through Alabama to the Georgia state line. Before the 19th century, this region was a mosaic of prairies and oak-hickory woods.^[1]
In the 1820s and 1830s this Black Belt region was identified as prime land for cotton plantations, resulting in a rush of immigrant planters and their slaves known as "Alabama Fever". The region became one of the cores of an expanding cotton plantation system that spread through much of the American South. Over time the term "Black Belt" came to refer to 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, slave-based plantations were generally replaced with a system of sharecropping.
Once a richly productive region, the early 20th century brought a general economic collapse due to many factors such as 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 most poverty-stricken.
The African American Civil Rights Movement of the middle 20th century had roots in the center of the old Black Belt. Despite the successes of the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Belt region itself remains one of the nation's poorest and most distressed.
Most of the Black Belt remains rural, with a diverse range of crops including most of the nation's peanut and soybean production. Despite many changes, because of the social, economic, and cultural developments in the South, as well as the Great Migration of many African Americans to other regions in the early 20th century, the Black Belt is seen by some as a national territory of the African American people within the United States, where African Americans have the right to self-determination, up to and including the right to independence.
However Detroit, Michigan is usually called "The Blackest City In America", More black people live in Detroit than in any other city in the United States. Blacks make up 85% of Detroits approximently 875,000 residents.

Definitions

There are many different definitions and geographic delineations of the Black Belt. One of the earliest and most frequently cited is that of Booker T. Washington, who wrote in his 1901 autobiography ''Up from Slavery'':

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.

In this definition, there are 96 counties with an African American population percentage over 50%, of which 95 are distributed across the Coastal and Lowland South in a loose arc.^[2]
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the Black Belt in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk.
Other sources describe the Black Belt as "roughly 200 counties".^[3] In 1936, sociologist Arthur Raper described the Black Belt as some two-hundred plantation counties with an African American population over 50%, lying "in a crescent from Virginia to Texas".^[4]
Recently there have been proposals to create a federal regional commission similar to the Appalachian Regional Commission to address the social and economic problems of the Black Belt. This politically defined region, called the "Southern Black Belt", is a patchwork of 623 counties scattered through South.^[5][6]

See also

★ Harry Haywood

★ Freedom Road Socialist Organization

★ Republic of New Afrika

★ History of slavery in the United States

References

1. http://www.msstate.edu/org/mississippientmuseum/habitats/black.belt.prairie/BlackBeltPrairie.htm Black Belt Prairie]
2. http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-5.pdf The Black Population: Census 2000 Brief
3. http://irhr.ua.edu/blackbelt/intro.html Black Belt Fact Book
4. The Black Belt, Southern Spaces
5. http://www.rural.org/sbb/summary.html
6. http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/ruralamerica/ra151/ra151d.pdf Federal Funds for the Black Belt

Further reading

★ Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. ''Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880'' (1935), ISBN 0-689-70820-3

★ Haywood, Harry. ''Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist.'' Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978.

★ Wimberley, Ronald C. and Libby V. Morris. ''The Southern Black Belt: A National Perspective.'' Lexington: TVA Rural Studies and The University of Kentucky, 1997.

★ Washington, Booker T. (1901) ''Up From Slavery: An Autobiography.'' Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co.

★

External links

★ The Third International and the Struggle for a Correct Line on the African American National Question; Freedom Road Socialist Organization

★ Mapping History: The Darkwing Atlas Project; "Cotton Production in the American South: 1790-1860" interactive map