The Black Belt Region in the United States refers to the social and demographic crescent of 623 southern counties that contain a higher than average percentages of African American residents. These counties are highly contiguous and form a belt-like pattern across parts of 11 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). For historical reasons, these counties are largely characterized by rural decline, inadequate education programs and acute problems of poverty, poor health, substandard housing, and underemployment. These characteristics especially apply to African Americans, but are also very true for most of the whites living in the region.

In Chapter VII of his 1901 autobiography "Up from Slavery", Booker T. Washington wrote of the Black Belt:

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.

Until the U.S. Civil War, the Black Belt was a major cotton growing area, utilizing the plantation system. The abolition of slavery, along with pervasive soil depletion and erosion, and the spread of the cotton boll weevil ended the reign of cotton as a major crop in the region. Most of the black belt remains rural, with a more diverse range of crops including most of the country's peanuts and soybeans. After the civil war and the end of reconstruction in the South, sharecropping became the dominant relations of 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.

"Black Belt" has also been used in the past to describe areas of the South Side of Chicago.

References

• Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (1935), ISBN 0689708203
• 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.

See also

• Black Belt (region of Alabama)
• Deep South, cultural and geographic subregion of the American South
• Harry Haywood, important theorist of African American national liberation.
• Freedom Road Socialist Organization, communist organization in the USA that argues for self-determination (up to and including the right to secession) for African Americans in the Black Belt South with full equality in the rest of the country.
• Republic of New Africa, black nationalist community that demanded the secession by the United States of the Southern states
• Belt regions of the United States

External links

• Twenty Five Years in the Black Belt - Electronic Edition. First person history by William Edwards, b. 1869. (from Documenting the American South. Univ. of NC).
• Freedom Road Socialist Organization, "The Third International and the Struggle for a Correct Line on the African American National Question"
• Mohr, James and John Nicols, "Cotton Production in the American South: 1790-1860" interactive map from Mohr and Nicols, eds., Mapping History: The Darkwing Atlas Project, Department of History, University of Oregon.

Regions of the United States | Southern United States | African-American history