Black Belt (U.S. region)

The Black Belt is a region of the Southern United States. The term originally described the prairies and dark fertile soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi. Because this area was developed for cotton plantations based on enslaved African-American labor, the term became associated with these conditions. It was generally applied to a much larger agricultural region in the American South characterized by a history of plantation agriculture in the 19th century and a high percentage of African Americans outside metropolitan areas; they were enslaved before the Civil War and many continued to work in agriculture for decades afterward.