Mobile Black Belt

Beyond its multi-county Alabama designation, the Black Belt as a landscape of primarily cotton agriculture and majority African American population covered a swath from Virginia through the Carolinas and across the Gulf South.

The Mississippi Black Belt is part of a larger region, stretching from Virginia south to the Carolinas and west through the Deep South, defined by a majority African American population and a long history of cotton production. ^ Washington, Booker T. (1901).

The rural Black Belt, with its largely African-American population, has historically ranked toward the bottom of American regions in terms of quality of life indicators such as poverty rates, median incomes, mortality, unemployment rates, and educational levels.

Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population.