+1 credit
| Version | Summary | Created by | Modification | Content Size | Created at | Operation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dean Liu | -- | 1922 | 2022-10-31 01:44:35 |
Video Upload Options
The Black Belt is a region of the Southern United States. The term originally described the prairies and dark fertile soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi. Because this area in the 19th century was historically developed for cotton plantations based on enslaved African American labor, the term became associated with these conditions. It was generally applied to a much larger agricultural region in the Southern United States, which was characterized by a history of cotton plantation agriculture in the 19th century and a high percentage of African Americans outside metropolitan areas. The enslaved peoples were freed after the American Civil War, and many continued to work in agriculture afterward. Their descendants make up much of the African-American population of the United States. During the first half of the 19th Century, as many as one million enslaved Africans were transported through sales in the domestic slave trade to the Deep South in a forced migration to work as laborers for the region's cotton plantations. After having lived enslaved for several generations in the area, many remained as rural workers, tenant farmers and sharecroppers after the Civil War and emancipation. Beginning in the early 20th century and up to 1970, a total of six million black people left the South in the Great Migration to find work and other opportunities in the industrial cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Because of relative isolation and lack of economic development, the rural communities in the Black Belt have historically faced acute poverty, rural exodus, inadequate education programs, low educational attainment, poor health care, urban decay, substandard housing, and high levels of crime and unemployment. In December 2017, the Special Rapporteur of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights declared that Alabama was the most impoverished area in the developed world. Given the history of decades of racial segregation into the late 20th century, African-American residents have been the most disproportionately affected, although these problems apply broadly to all ethnic groups in the rural Black Belt. The region and its boundaries have varying definitions, but it is generally considered a band through the center of the Deep South, although stretching from as far north as Delaware to as far west as East Texas.
References
- Arthur Raper, "The Black Belt", Southern Spaces, 2004 http://southernspaces.org/2004/black-belt
- "Black Belt Fact Book". University of Alabama. Archived from the original on 3 November 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20071103084855/http://irhr.ua.edu/blackbelt/intro.html.
- "The Black Population", Census 2000 Brief https://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/c2kbr01-5.pdf
- "The Southern Black Belt". http://www.rural.org/sbb/summary.html.
- "Federal Funds for the Black Belt". Economic Research Service. Archived from the original on 4 April 2012. https://web.archive.org/web/20120404222927/https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/ruralamerica/ra151/ra151d.pdf.
- "How Presidential Elections Are Impacted by a 100 Million Year-Old Coastline", Deep Sea News, June 2012 http://deepseanews.com/2012/06/how-presidential-elections-are-impacted-by-a-100-million-year-old-coastline/
- "Habitat: Black Belt Prairie". Mississippi State University. Archived from the original on 22 December 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20071222130313/http://www.msstate.edu/org/mississippientmuseum/habitats/black.belt.prairie/BlackBeltPrairie.htm.
- Haywood, Harry (1977). For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question. Chicago: Liberator Press.
- William H. Frey (May 2004). "The New Great Migration: Black Americans' Return to the South, 1965-to the present". Brookings Institution. brookings.edu. Retrieved July 10, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-new-great-migration-black-americans-return-to-the-south-1965-2000/
- William H. Frey (May 2004). "The New Great Migration: Black Americans' Return to the South, 1965-to the present". Brookings Institution. brookings.edu. Retrieved July 10, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-new-great-migration-black-americans-return-to-the-south-1965-2000/
- William H. Frey (May 2004). "The New Great Migration: Black Americans' Return to the South, 1965-to the present". Brookings Institution. brookings.edu. Retrieved July 10, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-new-great-migration-black-americans-return-to-the-south-1965-2000/
