Black Belt (region of Alabama)
Coordinates: 32°36′41.82″N 87°34′39.05″W / 32.6116167°N 87.5775139°W
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 initially the workers were predominantly African-American slaves. After the American Civil War, many freedmen stayed in the area as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, continuing to comprise a majority of the population. The sociological definition of the "Black Belt," as related to this ethnicity, refers to a much larger region of the Southern United States, stretching from Maryland to Texas but centered on the Black Belt of uplands areas of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana - the Deep South.
In the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, the white elites of the Black Belt were powerful in Alabama state politics. Rural elites continued to exercise power in state politics through the 1960s, as they did not redistrict after 1901. 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 public activism during the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s to 1968.
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