In the 1820s and 30s, the Black Belt identified a strip
of rich, dark, cotton-growing dirt drawing immigrants primarily from Georgia
and the Carolinas in an epidemic of "Alabama Fever." Following the forced
removal of Native Americans, the Black Belt emerged as the core of a rapidly
expanding plantation area. Geologically, the region lies within the Gulf
South's Coastal Plain in a crescent some twenty to twenty-five miles wide
that stretches from eastern, south-central Alabama into northwestern Mississippi.
The unusually fertile Black Belt (or
Prairies)
soil is produced by the weathering of an exposed limestone base known
as the Selma Chalk, the remnant of an ancient ocean floor.
Half of Alabama's enslaved population was concentrated within ten Black
Belt counties where the exploitation of their labor made this one of the
richest regions in the antebellum United States. During the "flush times,"
Black Belt commerce on the Alabama, Black Warrior, and Tombigbee
rivers
transformed towns such as Montgomery, Selma, Demopolis, and Tuscaloosa
and boosted the Gulf Coast port of Mobile.
Pro-slavery secessionist sentiment in the Black Belt led Alabama into the
Confederacy in 1861. Briefly, following emancipation and the South's
military defeat, African Americans first went to the state's polls in 1867
and held a variety of local, state, and national political offices. With
the mid-1870s however, came the restoration of white rule. Then, "for a
hundred years," wrote Selma civil rights attorney J. L. Chestnut in his
1990 autobiography, "the Black Belt dominated state politics and the big
landowners dominated the Black Belt."
Through violence, appeals to white supremacy, and massive voter fraud,
the Black Belt's oligarchs defeated the 1890s challenge of the Populists
and inscribed their power in a straitjacket of a state constitution that
disfranchised the African American population along with many poor whites.
This 1901 Alabama constitution, concluded historian Wayne Flynt, would
keep Alabama "throughout the twentieth century at or near the bottom among
all states in . . . property taxes, public services, and quality of life."
A second meaning of Black Belt as a region or place with majority-black
population grew as a consequence of the expansion of slavery throughout
the southern states. "I have often been asked to define the term 'Black
Belt,'" commented Booker T. Washington in 1901:
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 naturaly 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.
Beyond its multi-county Alabama designation, the Black Belt as a landscape
of primarily
cotton
agriculture and majority African American population covered a swath
from Virginia through the Carolinas and across the Gulf South. In 1903,
W. E. B. DuBois sought to describe African American life in the “heart
of the Black Belt” by focusing, in
Souls
of Black Folk, upon a south Georgia county.
The Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s called for the right of self-determination
for a Deep South "Black Belt nation." In his study of tenancy in two Georgia
counties,
Preface to Peasantry (1936), sociologist Arthur Raper understood
the Black Belt as some two-hundred plantation counties "in which over
half the population is Negro" lying "in a crescent from Virginia to Texas."
With decades of steady out-migration from the South, the Black Belt also
came to mean those parts of northern cities having heavy African American
populations. Making the 1927 journey described in
Black Boy (American
Hunger), Richard Wright traveled from Mississippi and Tennessee to
arrive among tens of thousands of African American migrants clustered
in Chicago’s north side. Wright commented that he crossed the “boundary
line of the Black Belt” in order to enter the south side, “that territory
where jobs were perhaps available to be had from white folks.” Finding
night work, he turned his daytime attention to “experimental writing,
filling endless pages with stream-of-consciousness Negro dialect, trying
to depict the dwellers of the Black Belt as I felt and saw them.”
In the first half of the twentieth century, years of soil erosion,
the boll weevil invasion, the collapse of cotton tenancy, the failure
to diversify economically, the urban exodus, and the repressive era of
Jim Crow all combined to mire the southern Black Belt in a seemingly
irreversible decline. What had been one of America's richest and most
politically powerful regions became one of its poorest.
In the 1950s and 1960s, long-oppressed African American residents of the
Alabama Black Belt, aided by Supreme Court decisions and congressional
actions, transformed small towns such as Tuskegee, Marion, Selma, Hayneville,
and Eutaw into scenes of some of the most critical moments of the modern
American freedom struggle. In the 1955-56
Montgomery
Bus Boycott, the figures of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr.
helped bring international attention to the mass mobilization for civil
rights. At lunch counters, in city parks, on courthouse squares, in registrars’
offices, and on the highways and backstreets, thousands of citizens challenged
the historical spaces and practices of segregation.
The Selma to Montgomery March, now commemorated by a
National
Historic Trail, led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Beginning with the election of the nation's first black probate judge
in Greene County in the late 1960s, grassroots activism resulted in the
coming to office of black sheriffs, county commissioners, county school
boards, mayors, and city council members. In a generation, the Black Belt
could count the largest concentration of African American elected officials
in the U. S.
The Alabama Black Belt as a region of insurgent African American aspirations
makes a strong claim to take over the meaning of the term from its older and
other senses. The electoral transformation here, however, remains thwarted
in efforts to tap the economic resources of this region which generates wealth
for a small number of individual landowners and for international timber and
paper corporations. Cottonfields no more, but pine tree plantations, cattle
pastures, and hunting leases cover tens of thousands of acres of the Black Belt,
its property owners benefiting from one of the most regressive tax structures in
the nation. Segregated education remains a common practice due to white flight
into private Christian academies.
Cultural tourism and commemorative events such as Civil War reenactors blowing
smoke at the Battle of Selma and human rights pilgrims annual crossing of the
Edmund Pettus Bridge dramatize two moments of conflict at the heart of the Black
Belt's history.
From this region of continuing economic inequality, African American women quilters
regularly emerge to dazzle visitors to the Smithsonian Institution's Festival of
American Folklife and aficianados of modern art at New York City's Whitney Museum.
To the Black Belt, in increasing numbers each year, visitors from throughout the
world come to trace the landscape and ponder the region's hard and far-from-finished
lessons.
