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. 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. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography īy 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. These 12 counties, stretching across southern Central Alabama from Georgia and Mississippi, constitute the principal portion of the famous Black Belt. There are 12 counties in Alabama in each of which the blacks are twice as numerous as the whites. Definitions īy 1894, political commentators used the term "Black Belt" so often that the term was already very well known in the United States. Political analysts and historians continue to use the term 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. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.Īfter 1945, a large fraction of the laborers were replaced by machinery, and they joined the Great Migration to cities of the Midwest and West. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history, especially concerning slavery and black workers, of the geological region known as the Black Belt.
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