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The Black Belt is a region of the U.S. state of Alabama. The term originally referred to the region's rich, black topsoil, much of it in the soil order Vertisols. The term took on an additional meaning in the 19th century, when the region was developed for cotton plantation agriculture, in which the workers were enslaved African Americans. After the American Civil War, many freedmen stayed in the area as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, continuing to comprise a majority of the population in many of these counties. The sociological definition of the "Black Belt," as related to the history of this cotton-dependent region, refers to a much larger region of the Southern United States, stretching from Delaware to Texas but centered on the Black Belt of uplands areas of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. In the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, the white elite of the Black Belt dominated Alabama state politics well into the 1960s. As in other Southern states, the white-dominated state legislature of Alabama passed laws and a constitution that created barriers to voter registration, essentially disfranchising most blacks and many poor whites. In addition, the state legislature did not redistrict congressional or state legislative districts after 1901 until it did so in the 1960s under US Supreme Court order. The white rural elite continued to dominate the state despite the rise of urbanized, industrial cities such as Birmingham, Alabama. Montgomery, the Black Belt's largest city, has been the capital of Alabama since 1846. Montgomery and Selma and other parts of the Black Belt were important centers of African-American public activism during the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s to 1968. Since the black population gained the renewed ability to exercise their franchise after 1965 under the Voting Rights Act, they have largely supported Democratic Party candidates. This is in contrast to the majority-white areas of the state, where since the late 20th century, conservatives have largely shifted from the Democratic to the Republican Party.