Black Belt (region of Alabama)

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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 soil, 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 physical geography of the "Black Belt" refers to a much larger region of the Southern United States, stretching from Delaware to Texas but centered on 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, a trend that has continued to the current day. As in other Southern states, the white-dominated state legislature of Alabama passed laws and...

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