Black Belt (region of Alabama)

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.

Since the black population gained the renewed ability to exercise the franchise under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, they have largely supported Democratic Party candidates.

[3] The National Heritage Area will help preserve historic sites of Black history, the Civil Rights movement, and promote tourism across 19 counties.

[4][5] The region is underlain by a thin layer of rich, black soil developed atop the chalk of the Selma Group, a geologic unit dating to the Cretaceous.

The state legislature did not redistrict to reflect population changes and the rise of urban areas from 1901 to 1972, when it was ordered by a federal court, following important apportionment cases such as Baker v. Carr (1964).

Many descendants of freed slaves continued to work as sharecroppers and laborers after emancipation, but many migrated among the counties, moved to cities, or left the state for other opportunities.

To escape lynchings and social oppression, and after the boll weevil and increased mechanization of agriculture, thousands of African Americans left Alabama to go to industrial cities of the North and Midwest in the Great Migration of the first half of the 20th century.

With the exception of parts of the city of Birmingham, the outline of Alabama's 7th congressional district roughly matches the western Black Belt region.