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The Black Belt is a region of the Southern United States. Although the term originally described the prairies and dark soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi, it has long been used to describe a broad agricultural region in the American South characterized by a history of plantation agriculture in the 19th century and a high percentage of African Americans in the population. During the first half of the nineteenth century, as many as one million enslaved African Americans were taken there 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 American Civil War and emancipation. 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. Given the history of decades of racial segregation into the late 20th century, African-American residents have been disproportionately most affected, but 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. ==History== ''Black Belt'' is still used in the physiographic sense, to describe a crescent-shaped region about long and up to wide, extending from southwest Tennessee to east-central Mississippi and then east through Alabama to the border with Georgia. Before the 19th century, this region was a mosaic of prairies and oak-hickory woods.〔(Black Belt Prairie ), Mississippi State University〕 In the 1820s and 1830s, the region was identified as prime land for upland cotton plantations, made possible by the invention of the cotton gin for processing short-staple cotton, which made this type of crop profitable. It grew better in the upland regions than did the long-staple cotton of the Low Country. Ambitious migrant planters moved to the area in a land rush called ''Alabama Fever''. Many brought slaves with them from the Upper South, or purchased them later in the domestic slave trade, resulting in the forced migration of an estimated one million workers. The region became one of the cores of an expanding cotton plantation system that spread through much of the American South. Eventually, the term Black Belt was used to describe the larger area of the South with historic ties to slave plantation agriculture and the cash crops of cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco. After the American Civil War and Emancipation, most freedmen worked on plantations generally by a system of sharecropping. The poverty of the South and decline in agricultural prices after the war caused suffering for planters and workers both. Although this had been a richly productive region, by the early 20th century, there was a general economic collapse. Among its many causes were continued depressed cotton prices, overreliance on agriculture, soil erosion and depletion, the boll weevil invasion, and subsequent collapse of the cotton economy, and the socially repressive Jim Crow laws. With the decline of agriculture in generating wealth, what had been one of the nation's wealthiest and most politically powerful regions became one of the poorest. After regaining power in the state legislatures and ending Reconstruction, at the end of the 19th century Democrats in the former Confederate states had completed disfranchising most blacks and many poor whites by passing new constitutions that provided for an array of discriminatory voter registration and electoral rules. The South became a one-party region, and whites controlled all Congressional representation allocated for the full population, although in many areas, the majority could not vote. It continued to be politically powerful for whites, as Democrats continued to have a one-party system through disfranchisement of blacks through much of the 20th century. They controlled a disproportionate number of seats in Congress, gaining seniority and thereby control of important committees. In the South and elsewhere, many states suffered malapportionment of state and congressional representatives, as rural areas had retained political control when state legislatures refused to redistrict long after demographic and economic shifts increasing population in urban areas. Lynchings were frequent as whites used violence to impose white supremacy; rates were high at times of economic stress and, annually, when it was time to settle accounts for sharecropping. The southern states passed Jim Crow laws establishing racial segregation in public facilities. During the first half of the twentieth century, up until 1970, a total of 6.5 million African Americans left the South in the Great Migration, which took place in two waves. They migrated to northern and midwestern industrial cities for jobs and other opportunities. The second wave of the migration began shortly before World War II, as thousands of blacks migrated to the West Coast for jobs related to the growing defense industries. Because of Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement, African-American residents of the old Black Belt became supporters of the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement, seeking protection for exercise of their constitutional rights as citizens. Due to the rural economies, the Black Belt remains one of the nation's poorest and most distressed areas. Most of the area continues to be rural, with a diverse agricultural economy, including peanut and soybean production. There have been many changes in the social, economic, and cultural developments in the South. Some blacks have considered the Black Belt as a kind of "national territory" for African Americans within the United States. In the 1970s, some activists proposed self-determination in the area, up to and including the right to independence.〔Haywood, Harry (1977). ''For a Revolutionary Position on the Negro Question''. Chicago: Liberator Press.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Black Belt (U.S. region)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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