The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion of the Southern United States. The term was first used to describe the states which were most economically dependent on plantations and slavery, specifically Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, the region suffered economic hardship and was a major site of racial tension during and after the Reconstruction era.
Deep South | |
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Nickname: The Cotton States | |
Country | United States |
Before 1945, the Deep South was often referred to as the "Cotton States" since cotton was the primary cash crop for economic production. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s helped usher in a new era, sometimes referred to as the New South. The Deep South is part of the highly-religious, socially conservative Bible Belt and is politically a stronghold of the Republican Party. It is contrasted with the Mid-South and Tidewater region, as well as the Upper South and the border states.
Usage
The term "Deep South" is defined in a variety of ways. Most definitions include the following states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.Texas and Florida are sometimes included, due to being peripheral states, having coastlines with the Gulf of Mexico, their history of slavery, large African American populations, and being part of the historical Confederate States of America.
The eastern part of Texas is the westernmost extension of the Deep South, typically the area east of Dallas.North Florida is also part of the Deep South region, typically the area north of Ocala.West Tennessee is sometimes included due to its history of slavery, its prominence in cotton production during the antebellum period, and cultural similarity to the Mississippi Delta region. The Arkansas Delta is also sometimes included, though Arkansas.
Seven states seceded from the United States before the firing on Fort Sumter and the start of the American Civil War, which originally formed the Confederate States of America. In order of secession, they are South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.
The first six states to secede were those that held the largest percentage of slaves. Ultimately, the Confederacy included eleven states. A large part of the original "Cotton Belt" is sometimes included in Deep South terminology. This was considered to extend from South Carolina Lowcountry to Georgia and North Florida, through the Gulf States as far west as East Texas, including West Tennessee, eastern Arkansas, and up the Mississippi embayment.
The inner core of the Deep South, characterized by very rich black soil that supported cotton plantations, is a geological formation known as the Black Belt. The Black Belt has since become better known as a sociocultural region; in this context it is a term used for much of the Cotton Belt, which had a high percentage of African-American slave labor. The Mississippi Delta has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth", because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history.
Origins
The colony of South Carolina was dominated by a planter class who initially migrated from the British Caribbean island of Barbados, and used the Barbados Slave Code of 1661 as a model to control and terrorize the African American slave population.Barbados provided a steady flow of sugar produced by slave labor to Europe and North America. The Georgia colony was initially founded by James Oglethorpe as a buffer state to defend the southern British colonies from Spanish Florida. Oglethorpe imagined a province populated by "sturdy farmers" who could guard the border; because of this, the colony's charter prohibited slavery. Unfortunately, the ban on slavery was lifted by 1751, and the colony became a royal colony in 1752.
At the time of the American Revolution, South Carolina and Georgia were majority African American, as indicated by the map on the right. In 1765, London philanthropist Dr. John Fothergill remarked on the cultural differences of the British American colonies southward from Maryland and those to the north, suggesting that Southerners were more similar to the people of the Caribbean than to the colonies to the north. A visiting French dignitary concurred in 1810 that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the Potomac River, and that Southern society resembled those of the Caribbean.
Although often used in history books to refer to the seven states that originally formed the Confederacy, the term "Deep South" did not come into general usage until long after the Civil War ended. For at least the remainder of the 19th century, "Lower South" was the primary designation for those states. At the time of the American Civil War, Florida and Texas were sparsely populated and not fully settled, with Florida and Texas being the least-populated and third least-populated of the 11 Confederate states, respectively.
When "Deep South" first began to gain mainstream currency in print in the middle of the 20th century, it applied to the states and areas of South Carolina, Georgia, southern Alabama, northern Florida, Mississippi, northern Louisiana, West Tennessee, southern Arkansas, and eastern Texas, all historical areas of cotton plantations and slavery. This was the part of the South many considered the "most Southern." In 1939, Florida was described as "still very largely an empty State," with only North Florida largely settled until after World War II.
Later, the general definition expanded to include all of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, as well as often taking in bordering areas of Eastern Arkansas, West Tennessee, East Texas and North Florida. In its broadest application, the Deep South is considered to be "an area roughly coextensive with the old cotton belt, from eastern North Carolina through South Carolina, west into East Texas, with extensions north and south along the Mississippi."
Early economics
The Deep South is generally associated historically with cotton production. The 11 Confederate States, including the Deep South, were overwhelmingly rural. New Orleans, Louisiana was the only populous city in the Confederacy during the Civil War.
After the Civil War, the region was economically poor. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, a small fraction of the white population composed of wealthy landowners, merchants and bankers controlled the economy and, largely, the politics. Most white farmers were poor and had to do manual work on their farms to survive. As prices fell, farmers' work became harder and longer because of a change from largely self-sufficient farms, based on corn and pigs, to the growing of a cash crop of cotton or tobacco. Cotton cultivation took twice as many hours of work as raising corn. The farmers lost their freedom to determine what crops they would grow, ran into increasing indebtedness, and many were forced into tenancy or into working for someone else. Some out-migration occurred, especially to Texas, but over time, the population continued to grow and the farms were subdivided smaller and smaller. Growing discontent helped give rise to the Populist movement in the early 1890s. It represented a sort of class warfare, in which the poor farmers sought to gain more of an economic and political voice.
Distinct from neighboring regions
By 1850, the term "Cotton States" was in common use, and the differences between the Deep South (lower) and Upland South (upper) were recognized. A key difference was the Deep South's plantation-style cash crop agriculture (mainly cotton, rice and sugar), using the forced labor of enslaved African Americans on large farms while plantation owners tended to live in towns and cities. This system of plantation farming was originally developed in the Caribbean West Indies and introduced to the United States in South Carolina and Louisiana, from where it spread throughout the Deep South, although there were local exceptions wherever conditions did not support the system. The sharp division between town and country, the intensive use of a few cash crops, and the high proportion of slaves, all differed from the Upland South.
The Tidewater region, encompassing the Chesapeake Bay and Eastern North Carolina, stands out as different from both the Deep South and Upland South. Its history of slavery originated in Virginia and predated the Caribbean plantation model, relying on tobacco as a cash crop from the start. Tidewater had few urban centers, instead establishing multiple markets along tributaries. Cotton and rice operations were large and factory-like, while tobacco profits hinged on skilled, careful, and efficient labor units.
Despite being the southernmost part of the continental United States, South Florida is not considered part of the Deep South. It has a tropical climate and high levels of migration from the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly in the densely populated Miami metropolitan area.
From Reconstruction through the Civil Rights Movement
After 1950, the region became a major center of the Civil Rights Movement, including: the work of Martin Luther King Jr., the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the 1964 Freedom Summer.
Major cities and urban areas
The Deep South has three major Metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) located solely within its boundaries, with populations exceeding 1,000,000 residents (Four including Memphis). Atlanta, the 8th largest metro area in the United States, is the Deep South's largest population center, followed by Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham.
Metropolitan areas
The 17 Deep South metropolitan areas (MSAs) within the 150 largest population centers in the United States are ranked below:
Rank | City | State | City (2022) | Metro Area | MSA (2022) | National Rank | CSA (2022) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Atlanta* | Georgia | 499,127 | Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta, GA MSA | 6,222,106 | 8 | 7,136,414 |
2 | New Orleans | Louisiana | 369,749 | New Orleans-Metairie, LA MSA | 1,246,176 | 47 | 1,348,462 |
3 | Birmingham | Alabama | 196,910 | Birmingham-Hoover, AL MSA | 1,116,857 | 50 | 1,362,731 |
4 | Greenville | South Carolina | 72,310 | Greenville-Anderson, SC MSA | 958,958 | 60 | 1,561,465 |
5 | Baton Rouge* | Louisiana | 221,453 | Baton Rouge, LA MSA | 873,060 | 66 | 1,010,108 |
6 | Columbia* | South Carolina | 139,698 | Columbia, SC MSA | 847,686 | 72 | 1,073,039 |
7 | Charleston | South Carolina | 153,672 | Charleston-North Charleston, SC MSA | 830,529 | 74 | 799,636 |
8 | Augusta | Georgia | 202,096 | Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC MSA | 624,083 | 96 | 615,933 |
9 | Jackson* | Mississippi | 145,995 | Jackson-Yazoo City, MS MSA | 583,197 | 99 | 688,270 |
10 | Chattanooga | Tennessee | 181,099 | Chattanooga, TN-GA MSA | 562,647 | 101 | 992,408 |
11 | Myrtle Beach | South Carolina | 38,417 | Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach SC-NC MSA | 536,165 | 111 | 447,823 |
12 | Huntsville | Alabama | 221,933 | Huntsville, AL MSA | 514,465 | 113 | 879,315 |
13 | Lafayette | Louisiana | 121,389 | Lafayette, LA MSA | 481,125 | 118 | 562,898 |
14 | Mobile | Alabama | 183,289 | Mobile County, AL MSA | 411,411 | 128 | 657,846 |
15 | Gulfport | Mississippi | 72,236 | Gulfport-Biloxi-Pascagoula, MS MSA | 420,782 | 133 | 442,432 |
16 | Savannah | Georgia | 148,004 | Savannah, GA MSA | 418,373 | 134 | 629,401 |
17 | Shreveport | Louisiana | 180,153 | Shreveport-Bossier City, LA MSA | 385,154 | 140 | 420,797 |
* Indicates state capital
Other substantial cities include:
State | Cities |
---|---|
Alabama | Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Auburn, and Dothan |
Georgia | Columbus, Macon, Valdosta and Athens |
Louisiana | Alexandria, Monroe, and Lake Charles |
Mississippi | Meridian, Tupelo, and Hattiesburg |
South Carolina | Sumter, and Florence |
Other cities sometimes included as part of the Deep South:
Rank | City | State | City (2022) | Metro Area | MSA (2022) | National Rank | CSA (2022) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Memphis | Tennessee | 621,056 | Memphis, TN MSA | 1,332,305 | 43 | 1,382,503 |
*
Climate
As part of the Sun Belt and Atlantic Plain, the Deep South tends to have a Subtropical climate with long hot summers and short mild winters. The 35th parallel north, which is used to define the northern boundary of the subtropics, defines the southern border of Tennessee, and the border between North Carolina and Georgia.
The climate tends to display more pronounced Subtropical characteristics the closer one gets to the Gulf Coast. For example, the Deep South substantially overlaps with the range of the American alligator.
Crops grow readily in the Deep South due to its climate consistently providing growing seasons of at least six months before the first frost. Some common environments include bayous and swamplands, as well as the southern pine forests. Due to its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, hurricanes are also a frequently-occurring natural disaster.
Booker T. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography
I have often been asked to define the term "Black Belt". So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.
People
Most White people in the Deep South who identified themselves with one European ethnic group in the 1980 census self-identified as English. This occurred in every southern state with the exception of Louisiana where more White people self-identified as French than English. A large number of the White population also derives from ethnic groups of Ireland (Irish and Ulster Scots). With regard to White people in the Deep South who reported only a single European-American ancestry group, the 1980 census showed the following self-identification in each state in this region:
- Alabama – 857,864 of 2,165,653 respondents (41%) self-identified as English only, which was the state's largest ancestral group by a wide margin.
- Georgia – 1,132,184 of 3,009,486 respondents (37.62%) self-identified as English only.
- Mississippi – 496,481 of 1,551,364 respondents (32%) self-identified as English only, which was the state's largest ancestral group by a wide margin.
- Florida – 1,132,033 of 5,159,967 respondents (21.94%) self-identified as English only.
- Louisiana – 480,711 of 2,319,259 respondents (20.73%) self-identified as French only, followed closely by 440,558 English-only respondents (19%).
- South Carolina – 578,338 of 1,706,966 respondents (33.88%) self-identified as English only. This is likely due to the fact that British colonization along the coasts of present-day South Carolina began earlier than colonization of other areas commonly classified as the Deep South.
- Texas – 1,639,322 of 7,859,393 respondents (20.86%) self-identified as English only, which was the state's largest ancestral group by a large margin.
These figures do not take into account people who self-identified as English and some other ancestral group. When the two were added together, people who self-identified as being English with other ancestry, made up an even larger portion of southerners.
As of 2003[update], the majority of Black Americans in the South live in the Black Belt in the American South from Virginia to Texas.
Hispanic and Latino Americans largely started arriving in the Deep South during the 1990s, and their numbers have grown rapidly. Politically they have not been very active.
Politics
Political expert Kevin Phillips states that, "From the end of Reconstruction until 1948, the Deep South Black Belts, where only whites could vote, were the nation's leading Democratic Party bastions."
From the late 1870s to the mid-1960s, conservative whites of the Deep South held control of state governments and overwhelmingly identified with and supported the Democratic Party. The most powerful leaders belonged to the party's moderate-to-conservative wing. The Republican Party would only control mainly mountain districts in Southern Appalachia, on the fringe of the Deep South, during the "Solid South" period.
At the turn of the 20th century, all Southern states, starting with Mississippi in 1890, passed new constitutions and other laws that effectively disenfranchised the great majority of blacks and sometimes many poor whites as well. Blacks were excluded subsequently from the political system entirely. The white Democratic-dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to impose white supremacy, including caste segregation of public facilities. In politics, the region became known for decades as the "Solid South". While this disenfranchisement was enforced, all of the states in this region were mainly one-party states dominated by white Southern Democrats. Southern representatives accrued outsized power in the Congress and the national Democratic Party, as they controlled all the seats apportioned to southern states based on total population, but only represented the richer subset of their white populations. In the 1928 presidential election, Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic, but carried all 5 Deep South states, though he nearly lost Alabama.
Major demographic changes would ensue in the 20th century. During the two waves of the Great Migration (1916–1970), a total of six million African Americans left the South for the Northeast, Midwest, and West, to escape the oppression and violence in the South. Beginning with the Goldwater–Johnson election of 1964, a significant contingent of white conservative voters in the Deep South stopped supporting national Democratic Party candidates and switched to the Republican Party. They still would vote for many Democrats at the state and local level into the 1990s. Political scientist Seth McKee concluded that in the 1964 presidential election, "Once again, the high level of support for Goldwater in the Deep South, and especially their Black Belt counties, spoke to the enduring significance of white resistance to black progress."
White southern voters consistently voted for the Democratic Party for many years to hold onto Jim Crow Laws. Once Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1932, the limited southern electorate found itself supporting Democratic candidates who frequently did not share its views. Journalist Matthew Yglesias argues:
The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes, moral values, and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn't share their views. They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South.
Kevin Phillips states that, "Beginning in 1948, however, the white voters of the Black Belts shifted partisan gears and sought to lead the Deep South out of the Democratic Party. Upcountry, pineywoods and bayou voters felt less hostility towards the New Deal and Fair Deal economic and caste policies which agitated the Black Belts, and for another decade, they kept The Deep South in the Democratic presidential column.
In the 1968 election, George Wallace carried all five Deep South states except for South Carolina, as well as Arkansas. Phillips emphasizes the three-way 1968 presidential election:
Wallace won very high support from Black Belt whites and no support at all from Black Belt Negroes. In the Black Belt counties of the Deep South, racial polarization was practically complete. Negroes voted for Hubert Humphrey, whites for George Wallace. GOP nominee Nixon garnered very little backing and counties where Barry Goldwater had captured 90 percent to 100 percent of the vote in 1964.
The Republican Party in the South had been crippled by the disenfranchisement of blacks, and the national party was unable to relieve their past with the South where Reconstruction was negatively viewed. During the Great Depression and the administration of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, some New Deal measures were promoted as intending to aid African Americans across the country and in the poor rural South, as well as poor whites. In the post-World War II era, Democratic Party presidents and national politicians began to support desegregation and other elements of the Civil Rights Movement, from President Harry S. Truman's desegregating the military, to John F. Kennedy's support for non-violent protests. These efforts culminated in Lyndon B. Johnson's important work in gaining Congressional approval for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since then, upwards of 90 percent of African Americans in the South have voted for the Democratic Party, including 93 percent for Obama in 2012.
Late 20th century to present
Historian Thomas Sugrue attributes the political and cultural changes, along with the easing of racial tensions, as the reason why Southern voters began to vote for Republican national candidates, in line with their political ideology. Since then, white Deep South voters have tended to vote for Republican candidates in most presidential elections. Times the Democratic Party has won in the Deep South since the late 20th century include: the 1976 election when Georgia native Jimmy Carter received the Democratic nomination, the 1980 election when Carter won Georgia; the 1992 election when Arkansas native and former governor Bill Clinton won Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the 1996 election when the incumbent president Clinton again won Louisiana, Tennessee and Arkansas, and when Georgia was won by Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election.
In 1995, Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich was elected by representatives of a Republican-dominated House as Speaker of the House. The incumbent Speaker of the House since October 2023, Republican Mike Johnson, is from Louisiana.
Since the 1990s the white majority has continued to shift toward Republican candidates at the state and local levels. This trend culminated in 2014 when the Republicans swept every statewide office in the Deep South region midterm elections. As a result, the Republican party came to control all the state legislatures in the region, as well as all House seats that were not representing majority-minority districts.
Presidential elections in which the Deep South diverged noticeably from the Upper South occurred in 1928, 1948, 1964, 1968, and, to a lesser extent, in 1952, 1956, 1992, and 2008. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee fared well in the Deep South in the 2008 Republican primaries, losing only one state (South Carolina) while running (he had dropped out of the race before the Mississippi primary).
Georgia is currently considered a Swing state. In the 2020 presidential election, the state of Georgia was considered a toss-up state hinting at a possible Democratic shift in the area. It ultimately voted Democratic, in favor of Joe Biden. During the 2021 January Senate runoff elections, Georgia also voted for two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, with Warnock winning re-election to a full term the following year. Republicans currently hold every statewide office, its state Supreme Court, and its legislature.
States
From colonial times to the early twentieth century, much of the Lower South had a black majority. Three Southern states had populations that were majority-black: Louisiana (from 1810 until about 1890), South Carolina (until the 1920s), and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s). In the same period, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida had populations that were nearly 50% black, while Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia had black populations approaching or exceeding 40%. Texas' black population reached 30%.
The demographics of these states changed markedly from the 1890s through the 1950s, as two waves of the Great Migration led more than 6,500,000 African-Americans to abandon the economically depressed, segregated Deep South in search of better employment opportunities and living conditions, first in Northern and Midwestern industrial cities, and later west to California. One-fifth of Florida's black population had left the state by 1940, for instance. During the last thirty years of the twentieth century into the twenty-first century, scholars have documented a reverse New Great Migration of black people back to southern states, but typically to destinations in the New South, which have the best jobs and developing economies.
The District of Columbia, one of the magnets for black people during the Great Migration, was long the sole majority-minority federal jurisdiction in the continental U.S. The black proportion has declined since the 1990s due to gentrification and expanding opportunities, with many black people moving to southern states such as Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Maryland and others migrating to jobs in states of the New South in a reverse of the Great Migration.
Transportation
- U.S. Route 90 runs from Van Horn, Texas to Jacksonville, Florida.
- U.S. Route 11 runs through the Deep South to the Canadian border in New York.
- Interstate 10 is a major transcontinental east–west highway that travels through the far southern portion of the Deep South, with its eastern terminus at I-95 in Jacksonville, Florida.
- Interstate 55 is a major north–south route traveling from Chicago, Illinois to New Orleans, Louisiana. The interstate travels through the Deep South cities of Memphis, Jackson, and New Orleans.
- Interstate 40 is a major transcontinental east–west route that travels from Barstow, California to Wilmington, North Carolina. It meets Interstate 55 in Memphis.
- Interstate 49 is a partially complete interstate running north–south centrally in the United States. It runs currently in the Deep South from Texarkana, Arkansas through Shreveport, and Alexandria to Lafayette, Louisiana.
- Interstate 20 runs from West Texas to Florence, South Carolina. It travels through the Deep South cities of Tyler, Shreveport, Jackson, Birmingham, Atlanta, Augusta, and Columbia.
- Interstate 75 runs from Chattanooga, Tennessee through Georgia down to Miami, Florida.
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{{cite web}}
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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.
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- "African Americans Archived July 25, 2020, at the Wayback Machine". Handbook of Texas. Retrieved on December 17, 2011.
- Maxine D. Rogers, et al., Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida in January 1923, December 1993, p. 5 "Rosewood". Archived from the original on May 15, 2008. Retrieved May 1, 2008., March 28, 2008
- William H. Frey, "The New Great Migration: Black Americans' Return to the South, 1965–2000", The Brookings Institution, May 2004, pp. 1–5 "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on April 28, 2008. Retrieved May 19, 2008.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link), accessed March 19, 2008
Further reading
- Black, Merle, and Earl Black. "Deep South politics: the enduring racial division in national elections". doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195381948.013.0018.
- Brown, D. Clayton. King Cotton: A Cultural, Political, and Economic History since 1945 (University Press of Mississippi, 2011) 440 pp. ISBN 978-1-60473-798-1
- Davis, Allison. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941) classic case study from the late 1930s
- Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1941), a classic case study
- Fite, Gilbert C. Cotton fields no more: Southern agriculture, 1865–1980 (University Press of Kentucky, 2015).
- Gulley, Harold E. "Women and the lost cause: Preserving a Confederate identity in the American Deep South". Journal of historical geography 19.2 (1993): 125–141.
- Harris, J. William. Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation (2003)
- Hughes, Dudley J. Oil in the Deep South: A History of the Oil Business in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, 1859–1945 (University Press of Mississippi, 1993).
- Key, V.O. Southern Politics in State and Nation (1951) classic political analysis, state by state. online free to borrow
- Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Louisiana State University Press, 1986) major scholarly survey with detailed bibliography; online free to borrow.
- Lang, Clarence. "Locating the civil rights movement: An essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and border South in Black Freedom Studies". Journal of Social History 47.2 (2013): 371–400. Online
- Pierce, Neal R. The Deep South States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Seven States of the Deep South (1974) in-depth study of politics and issues, state by state
- Rogers, William Warren, et al. Alabama: The history of a deep south state (University of Alabama Press, 2018).
- Roller, David C. and Robert W. Twyman, eds. The Encyclopedia of Southern History (Louisiana State University Press, 1979)
- Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2007)
- Thornton, J. Mills. Politics and power in a slave society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (1978) online free to borrow
- Vance, Rupert B. Regionalism and the South (UNC Press Books, 1982).
Primary sources
- Carson, Clayborne et al. eds. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle (Penguin, 1991), 784pp.
- Johnson, Charles S. Statistical atlas of southern counties: listing and analysis of socio-economic indices of 1104 southern counties (1941). excerpt
- Raines, Howell, ed. My soul is rested: Movement days in the deep south remembered (Penguin, 1983).
The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion of the Southern United States The term was first used to describe the states which were most economically dependent on plantations and slavery specifically Louisiana Mississippi Alabama Georgia and South Carolina After the American Civil War ended in 1865 the region suffered economic hardship and was a major site of racial tension during and after the Reconstruction era Deep SouthSubregionNickname The Cotton StatesStates highlighted are geographically the southernmost states in the contiguous United States The states in dark red comprise what is commonly referred to as the Deep South subregion while the Deep South overlaps into portions of those in lighter red CountryUnited States Before 1945 the Deep South was often referred to as the Cotton States since cotton was the primary cash crop for economic production The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s helped usher in a new era sometimes referred to as the New South The Deep South is part of the highly religious socially conservative Bible Belt and is politically a stronghold of the Republican Party It is contrasted with the Mid South and Tidewater region as well as the Upper South and the border states UsageMajority Black Counties in the U S as of the 2020 United States Census The term Deep South is defined in a variety of ways Most definitions include the following states Louisiana Mississippi Alabama Georgia and South Carolina Texas and Florida are sometimes included due to being peripheral states having coastlines with the Gulf of Mexico their history of slavery large African American populations and being part of the historical Confederate States of America The eastern part of Texas is the westernmost extension of the Deep South typically the area east of Dallas North Florida is also part of the Deep South region typically the area north of Ocala West Tennessee is sometimes included due to its history of slavery its prominence in cotton production during the antebellum period and cultural similarity to the Mississippi Delta region The Arkansas Delta is also sometimes included though Arkansas Seven states seceded from the United States before the firing on Fort Sumter and the start of the American Civil War which originally formed the Confederate States of America In order of secession they are South Carolina Mississippi Florida Alabama Georgia Louisiana and Texas The first six states to secede were those that held the largest percentage of slaves Ultimately the Confederacy included eleven states A large part of the original Cotton Belt is sometimes included in Deep South terminology This was considered to extend from South Carolina Lowcountry to Georgia and North Florida through the Gulf States as far west as East Texas including West Tennessee eastern Arkansas and up the Mississippi embayment The inner core of the Deep South characterized by very rich black soil that supported cotton plantations is a geological formation known as the Black Belt The Black Belt has since become better known as a sociocultural region in this context it is a term used for much of the Cotton Belt which had a high percentage of African American slave labor The Mississippi Delta has been called The Most Southern Place on Earth because of its unique racial cultural and economic history OriginsA map of the Thirteen Colonies in 1770 showing the number of slaves in each colony The colony of South Carolina was dominated by a planter class who initially migrated from the British Caribbean island of Barbados and used the Barbados Slave Code of 1661 as a model to control and terrorize the African American slave population Barbados provided a steady flow of sugar produced by slave labor to Europe and North America The Georgia colony was initially founded by James Oglethorpe as a buffer state to defend the southern British colonies from Spanish Florida Oglethorpe imagined a province populated by sturdy farmers who could guard the border because of this the colony s charter prohibited slavery Unfortunately the ban on slavery was lifted by 1751 and the colony became a royal colony in 1752 At the time of the American Revolution South Carolina and Georgia were majority African American as indicated by the map on the right In 1765 London philanthropist Dr John Fothergill remarked on the cultural differences of the British American colonies southward from Maryland and those to the north suggesting that Southerners were more similar to the people of the Caribbean than to the colonies to the north A visiting French dignitary concurred in 1810 that American customs seemed entirely changed over the Potomac River and that Southern society resembled those of the Caribbean Although often used in history books to refer to the seven states that originally formed the Confederacy the term Deep South did not come into general usage until long after the Civil War ended For at least the remainder of the 19th century Lower South was the primary designation for those states At the time of the American Civil War Florida and Texas were sparsely populated and not fully settled with Florida and Texas being the least populated and third least populated of the 11 Confederate states respectively When Deep South first began to gain mainstream currency in print in the middle of the 20th century it applied to the states and areas of South Carolina Georgia southern Alabama northern Florida Mississippi northern Louisiana West Tennessee southern Arkansas and eastern Texas all historical areas of cotton plantations and slavery This was the part of the South many considered the most Southern In 1939 Florida was described as still very largely an empty State with only North Florida largely settled until after World War II Later the general definition expanded to include all of South Carolina Georgia Alabama Mississippi and Louisiana as well as often taking in bordering areas of Eastern Arkansas West Tennessee East Texas and North Florida In its broadest application the Deep South is considered to be an area roughly coextensive with the old cotton belt from eastern North Carolina through South Carolina west into East Texas with extensions north and south along the Mississippi Early economicsPopulation of African Americans by county in 1860 The Deep South is generally associated historically with cotton production The 11 Confederate States including the Deep South were overwhelmingly rural New Orleans Louisiana was the only populous city in the Confederacy during the Civil War After the Civil War the region was economically poor After Reconstruction ended in 1877 a small fraction of the white population composed of wealthy landowners merchants and bankers controlled the economy and largely the politics Most white farmers were poor and had to do manual work on their farms to survive As prices fell farmers work became harder and longer because of a change from largely self sufficient farms based on corn and pigs to the growing of a cash crop of cotton or tobacco Cotton cultivation took twice as many hours of work as raising corn The farmers lost their freedom to determine what crops they would grow ran into increasing indebtedness and many were forced into tenancy or into working for someone else Some out migration occurred especially to Texas but over time the population continued to grow and the farms were subdivided smaller and smaller Growing discontent helped give rise to the Populist movement in the early 1890s It represented a sort of class warfare in which the poor farmers sought to gain more of an economic and political voice Distinct from neighboring regions Ecoregions associated with the Deep SouthNatural range of loblolly pine which covers most of the Deep South and Tidewater The Mississippi Alluvial Plain created by the Mississippi River By 1850 the term Cotton States was in common use and the differences between the Deep South lower and Upland South upper were recognized A key difference was the Deep South s plantation style cash crop agriculture mainly cotton rice and sugar using the forced labor of enslaved African Americans on large farms while plantation owners tended to live in towns and cities This system of plantation farming was originally developed in the Caribbean West Indies and introduced to the United States in South Carolina and Louisiana from where it spread throughout the Deep South although there were local exceptions wherever conditions did not support the system The sharp division between town and country the intensive use of a few cash crops and the high proportion of slaves all differed from the Upland South The Tidewater region encompassing the Chesapeake Bay and Eastern North Carolina stands out as different from both the Deep South and Upland South Its history of slavery originated in Virginia and predated the Caribbean plantation model relying on tobacco as a cash crop from the start Tidewater had few urban centers instead establishing multiple markets along tributaries Cotton and rice operations were large and factory like while tobacco profits hinged on skilled careful and efficient labor units Despite being the southernmost part of the continental United States South Florida is not considered part of the Deep South It has a tropical climate and high levels of migration from the Caribbean and Latin America particularly in the densely populated Miami metropolitan area From Reconstruction through the Civil Rights MovementAfter 1950 the region became a major center of the Civil Rights Movement including the work of Martin Luther King Jr the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott the 1960 founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee SNCC and the 1964 Freedom Summer Major cities and urban areasThe Deep South has three major Metropolitan statistical areas MSAs located solely within its boundaries with populations exceeding 1 000 000 residents Four including Memphis Atlanta the 8th largest metro area in the United States is the Deep South s largest population center followed by Memphis New Orleans and Birmingham Metropolitan areas The 17 Deep South metropolitan areas MSAs within the 150 largest population centers in the United States are ranked below Rank City State City 2022 Metro Area MSA 2022 National Rank CSA 2022 1 Atlanta Georgia 499 127 Atlanta Sandy Springs Alpharetta GA MSA 6 222 106 8 7 136 4142 New Orleans Louisiana 369 749 New Orleans Metairie LA MSA 1 246 176 47 1 348 4623 Birmingham Alabama 196 910 Birmingham Hoover AL MSA 1 116 857 50 1 362 7314 Greenville South Carolina 72 310 Greenville Anderson SC MSA 958 958 60 1 561 4655 Baton Rouge Louisiana 221 453 Baton Rouge LA MSA 873 060 66 1 010 1086 Columbia South Carolina 139 698 Columbia SC MSA 847 686 72 1 073 0397 Charleston South Carolina 153 672 Charleston North Charleston SC MSA 830 529 74 799 6368 Augusta Georgia 202 096 Augusta Richmond County GA SC MSA 624 083 96 615 9339 Jackson Mississippi 145 995 Jackson Yazoo City MS MSA 583 197 99 688 27010 Chattanooga Tennessee 181 099 Chattanooga TN GA MSA 562 647 101 992 40811 Myrtle Beach South Carolina 38 417 Myrtle Beach Conway North Myrtle Beach SC NC MSA 536 165 111 447 82312 Huntsville Alabama 221 933 Huntsville AL MSA 514 465 113 879 31513 Lafayette Louisiana 121 389 Lafayette LA MSA 481 125 118 562 89814 Mobile Alabama 183 289 Mobile County AL MSA 411 411 128 657 84615 Gulfport Mississippi 72 236 Gulfport Biloxi Pascagoula MS MSA 420 782 133 442 43216 Savannah Georgia 148 004 Savannah GA MSA 418 373 134 629 40117 Shreveport Louisiana 180 153 Shreveport Bossier City LA MSA 385 154 140 420 797 Indicates state capital Other substantial cities include State CitiesAlabama Montgomery Tuscaloosa Auburn and DothanGeorgia Columbus Macon Valdosta and AthensLouisiana Alexandria Monroe and Lake CharlesMississippi Meridian Tupelo and HattiesburgSouth Carolina Sumter and Florence Other cities sometimes included as part of the Deep South Rank City State City 2022 Metro Area MSA 2022 National Rank CSA 2022 1 Memphis Tennessee 621 056 Memphis TN MSA 1 332 305 43 1 382 503 ClimateGeographic regions associated with the Deep SouthExtent of the Atlantic Plain Continental Shelf province as indicated by the 1928 work by Fenneman Approximate range of the American alligator As part of the Sun Belt and Atlantic Plain the Deep South tends to have a Subtropical climate with long hot summers and short mild winters The 35th parallel north which is used to define the northern boundary of the subtropics defines the southern border of Tennessee and the border between North Carolina and Georgia The climate tends to display more pronounced Subtropical characteristics the closer one gets to the Gulf Coast For example the Deep South substantially overlaps with the range of the American alligator Crops grow readily in the Deep South due to its climate consistently providing growing seasons of at least six months before the first frost Some common environments include bayous and swamplands as well as the southern pine forests Due to its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean hurricanes are also a frequently occurring natural disaster Booker T Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography I have often been asked to define the term Black Belt So far as I can learn the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil The part of the country possessing this thick dark and naturally rich soil was of course the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers Later and especially since the war the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense that is to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white People2000 Census Population Ancestry Map with African American ancestry in purple Most White people in the Deep South who identified themselves with one European ethnic group in the 1980 census self identified as English This occurred in every southern state with the exception of Louisiana where more White people self identified as French than English A large number of the White population also derives from ethnic groups of Ireland Irish and Ulster Scots With regard to White people in the Deep South who reported only a single European American ancestry group the 1980 census showed the following self identification in each state in this region Alabama 857 864 of 2 165 653 respondents 41 self identified as English only which was the state s largest ancestral group by a wide margin Georgia 1 132 184 of 3 009 486 respondents 37 62 self identified as English only Mississippi 496 481 of 1 551 364 respondents 32 self identified as English only which was the state s largest ancestral group by a wide margin Florida 1 132 033 of 5 159 967 respondents 21 94 self identified as English only Louisiana 480 711 of 2 319 259 respondents 20 73 self identified as French only followed closely by 440 558 English only respondents 19 South Carolina 578 338 of 1 706 966 respondents 33 88 self identified as English only This is likely due to the fact that British colonization along the coasts of present day South Carolina began earlier than colonization of other areas commonly classified as the Deep South Texas 1 639 322 of 7 859 393 respondents 20 86 self identified as English only which was the state s largest ancestral group by a large margin These figures do not take into account people who self identified as English and some other ancestral group When the two were added together people who self identified as being English with other ancestry made up an even larger portion of southerners As of 2003 update the majority of Black Americans in the South live in the Black Belt in the American South from Virginia to Texas Hispanic and Latino Americans largely started arriving in the Deep South during the 1990s and their numbers have grown rapidly Politically they have not been very active PoliticsThis map shows the county swing in the 1964 presidential election The 5 Deep South states along with Northern Florida had the strongest swings to Republican nominee Barry Goldwater Note that Texas was the home state of Democratic nominee Lyndon B Johnson Political expert Kevin Phillips states that From the end of Reconstruction until 1948 the Deep South Black Belts where only whites could vote were the nation s leading Democratic Party bastions From the late 1870s to the mid 1960s conservative whites of the Deep South held control of state governments and overwhelmingly identified with and supported the Democratic Party The most powerful leaders belonged to the party s moderate to conservative wing The Republican Party would only control mainly mountain districts in Southern Appalachia on the fringe of the Deep South during the Solid South period At the turn of the 20th century all Southern states starting with Mississippi in 1890 passed new constitutions and other laws that effectively disenfranchised the great majority of blacks and sometimes many poor whites as well Blacks were excluded subsequently from the political system entirely The white Democratic dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to impose white supremacy including caste segregation of public facilities In politics the region became known for decades as the Solid South While this disenfranchisement was enforced all of the states in this region were mainly one party states dominated by white Southern Democrats Southern representatives accrued outsized power in the Congress and the national Democratic Party as they controlled all the seats apportioned to southern states based on total population but only represented the richer subset of their white populations In the 1928 presidential election Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic but carried all 5 Deep South states though he nearly lost Alabama Major demographic changes would ensue in the 20th century During the two waves of the Great Migration 1916 1970 a total of six million African Americans left the South for the Northeast Midwest and West to escape the oppression and violence in the South Beginning with the Goldwater Johnson election of 1964 a significant contingent of white conservative voters in the Deep South stopped supporting national Democratic Party candidates and switched to the Republican Party They still would vote for many Democrats at the state and local level into the 1990s Political scientist Seth McKee concluded that in the 1964 presidential election Once again the high level of support for Goldwater in the Deep South and especially their Black Belt counties spoke to the enduring significance of white resistance to black progress White southern voters consistently voted for the Democratic Party for many years to hold onto Jim Crow Laws Once Franklin D Roosevelt came to power in 1932 the limited southern electorate found itself supporting Democratic candidates who frequently did not share its views Journalist Matthew Yglesias argues The weird thing about Jim Crow politics is that white southerners with conservative views on taxes moral values and national security would vote for Democratic presidential candidates who didn t share their views They did that as part of a strategy for maintaining white supremacy in the South Kevin Phillips states that Beginning in 1948 however the white voters of the Black Belts shifted partisan gears and sought to lead the Deep South out of the Democratic Party Upcountry pineywoods and bayou voters felt less hostility towards the New Deal and Fair Deal economic and caste policies which agitated the Black Belts and for another decade they kept The Deep South in the Democratic presidential column In the 1968 election George Wallace carried all five Deep South states except for South Carolina as well as Arkansas Phillips emphasizes the three way 1968 presidential election Wallace won very high support from Black Belt whites and no support at all from Black Belt Negroes In the Black Belt counties of the Deep South racial polarization was practically complete Negroes voted for Hubert Humphrey whites for George Wallace GOP nominee Nixon garnered very little backing and counties where Barry Goldwater had captured 90 percent to 100 percent of the vote in 1964 The Republican Party in the South had been crippled by the disenfranchisement of blacks and the national party was unable to relieve their past with the South where Reconstruction was negatively viewed During the Great Depression and the administration of Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt some New Deal measures were promoted as intending to aid African Americans across the country and in the poor rural South as well as poor whites In the post World War II era Democratic Party presidents and national politicians began to support desegregation and other elements of the Civil Rights Movement from President Harry S Truman s desegregating the military to John F Kennedy s support for non violent protests These efforts culminated in Lyndon B Johnson s important work in gaining Congressional approval for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 Since then upwards of 90 percent of African Americans in the South have voted for the Democratic Party including 93 percent for Obama in 2012 Late 20th century to present Historian Thomas Sugrue attributes the political and cultural changes along with the easing of racial tensions as the reason why Southern voters began to vote for Republican national candidates in line with their political ideology Since then white Deep South voters have tended to vote for Republican candidates in most presidential elections Times the Democratic Party has won in the Deep South since the late 20th century include the 1976 election when Georgia native Jimmy Carter received the Democratic nomination the 1980 election when Carter won Georgia the 1992 election when Arkansas native and former governor Bill Clinton won Georgia Tennessee Louisiana and Arkansas the 1996 election when the incumbent president Clinton again won Louisiana Tennessee and Arkansas and when Georgia was won by Joe Biden in the 2020 United States presidential election In 1995 Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich was elected by representatives of a Republican dominated House as Speaker of the House The incumbent Speaker of the House since October 2023 Republican Mike Johnson is from Louisiana Since the 1990s the white majority has continued to shift toward Republican candidates at the state and local levels This trend culminated in 2014 when the Republicans swept every statewide office in the Deep South region midterm elections As a result the Republican party came to control all the state legislatures in the region as well as all House seats that were not representing majority minority districts Presidential elections in which the Deep South diverged noticeably from the Upper South occurred in 1928 1948 1964 1968 and to a lesser extent in 1952 1956 1992 and 2008 Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee fared well in the Deep South in the 2008 Republican primaries losing only one state South Carolina while running he had dropped out of the race before the Mississippi primary Georgia is currently considered a Swing state In the 2020 presidential election the state of Georgia was considered a toss up state hinting at a possible Democratic shift in the area It ultimately voted Democratic in favor of Joe Biden During the 2021 January Senate runoff elections Georgia also voted for two Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock with Warnock winning re election to a full term the following year Republicans currently hold every statewide office its state Supreme Court and its legislature StatesFrom colonial times to the early twentieth century much of the Lower South had a black majority Three Southern states had populations that were majority black Louisiana from 1810 until about 1890 South Carolina until the 1920s and Mississippi from the 1830s to the 1930s In the same period Georgia Alabama and Florida had populations that were nearly 50 black while Maryland North Carolina and Virginia had black populations approaching or exceeding 40 Texas black population reached 30 The demographics of these states changed markedly from the 1890s through the 1950s as two waves of the Great Migration led more than 6 500 000 African Americans to abandon the economically depressed segregated Deep South in search of better employment opportunities and living conditions first in Northern and Midwestern industrial cities and later west to California One fifth of Florida s black population had left the state by 1940 for instance During the last thirty years of the twentieth century into the twenty first century scholars have documented a reverse New Great Migration of black people back to southern states but typically to destinations in the New South which have the best jobs and developing economies The District of Columbia one of the magnets for black people during the Great Migration was long the sole majority minority federal jurisdiction in the continental U S The black proportion has declined since the 1990s due to gentrification and expanding opportunities with many black people moving to southern states such as Texas Georgia Florida and Maryland and others migrating to jobs in states of the New South in a reverse of the Great Migration TransportationU S Route 90 runs from Van Horn Texas to Jacksonville Florida U S Route 11 runs through the Deep South to the Canadian border in New York Interstate 10 is a major transcontinental east west highway that travels through the far southern portion of the Deep South with its eastern terminus at I 95 in Jacksonville Florida Interstate 55 is a major north south route traveling from Chicago Illinois to New Orleans Louisiana The interstate travels through the Deep South cities of Memphis Jackson and New Orleans Interstate 40 is a major transcontinental east west route that travels from Barstow California to Wilmington North Carolina It meets Interstate 55 in Memphis Interstate 49 is a partially complete interstate running north south centrally in the United States It runs currently in the Deep South from Texarkana Arkansas through Shreveport and Alexandria to Lafayette Louisiana Interstate 20 runs from West Texas to Florence South Carolina It travels through the Deep South cities of Tyler Shreveport Jackson Birmingham Atlanta Augusta and Columbia Interstate 75 runs from Chattanooga Tennessee through Georgia down to Miami Florida ReferencesFryer Darcy The Origins of the Lower South Lehigh University Archived from the original on March 5 2013 Retrieved December 30 2008 Freehling William 1994 The Editorial Revolution Virginia and the Coming of the Civil War A Review Essay The Reintegration of American History New York Oxford University Press p 10 ISBN 978 0 19 508808 3 Retrieved December 30 2008 Deep South The Free Dictionary Archived from the original on November 8 2017 Retrieved May 25 2018 Neal R Pierce The Deep South States of America People Politics and Power in the Seven States of the Deep South 1974 pp 123 61 Anglo American Colonization Texas State Historical Association Archived from the original on July 25 2022 Retrieved May 15 2022 Solomon Irvin 1998 Race And Civil War In South Florida Florida Historical Quarterly 77 3 320 341 JSTOR 30147583 Randal Rust Cotton Tennessee Encyclopedia Retrieved March 22 2022 History and Culture of the Mississippi Delta Region Lower Mississippi Delta Region U S National Park Service www nps gov Retrieved March 22 2022 Williard B Gatewood Jr Jeannie M Whayne eds 1996 The Arkansas Delta Land of Paradox University of Arkansas Press p 3 ISBN 978 1 61075 032 5 Diane D Blair Jay Barth 2005 Arkansas Politics and Government University of Nebraska Press p 66 ISBN 0 8032 0489 2 John Reed and Dale Volberg Reed 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South Doubleday 1996 James C Cobb The Most Southern Place on Earth The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity 1992 Ira Berlin Generations of Captivity A History of African American Slaves 2003 pp 272 276 Joseph Hall The Great Indian Slave Caper review of Alan Gallay The Indian Slave Trade The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670 1717 Archived October 9 2016 at the Wayback Machine Common place vol 3 no 1 October 2002 accessed 5 March 2017 Richard B Sheridan 1974 Sugar and Slavery An Economic History of the British West Indies 1623 1775 Canoe Press pp 415 26 ISBN 9789768125132 Royal Georgia 1752 1776 New Georgia Encyclopedia Archived from the original on July 24 2018 Retrieved July 24 2018 James C Cobb 2005 Away Down South A History of Southern Identity Oxford University Press pp 10 12 ISBN 9780198025016 1860 Census of Population and Housing Census gov January 7 2009 Archived from the original on July 19 2018 Retrieved August 29 2010 Roller David C and Twyman Robert W editors 1979 The Encyclopedia of Southern History Baton Rouge Louisiana State University Press James C Cobb The Most Southern Place on Earth The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity 1992 p vii Federal Writers Project 1939 Florida A Guide to the Southernmost State New York Oxford University Press p 7 Ted Ownby The Defeated Generation at Work White Farmers in the Deep South 1865 1890 Southern Studies 23 1984 325 347 Edward L Ayers The promise of the new South Life after reconstruction Oxford University Press 2007 187 214 283 289 For Antebellum differences between the Upper South and Lower South see Meinig 1998 pp 222 224 Colonial Virginia Encyclopedia Virginia Archived from the original on August 30 2024 Retrieved May 12 2021 Cutway Adrienne October 21 2014 Officials want South Florida to break off into its own state Orlandosentinel com Retrieved July 10 2018 Officials want to create 51st state in South Florida Archived from the original on October 22 2014 Retrieved October 22 2014 Clarence Lang Locating the civil rights movement An essay on the Deep South Midwest and border South in Black Freedom Studies Journal of Social History 47 2 2013 371 400 Online Howell Raines My soul is rested Movement days in the deep south remembered Penguin 1983 Washington Booker T 1901 Up From Slavery Retrieved January 26 2020 Grady McWhiney Cracker Culture Celtic Ways in the Old South 1989 David Hackett Fischer Albion s Seed Four British Folkways in America 1989 pp 605 757 Archived copy PDF Archived from the original PDF on October 26 2019 Retrieved October 26 2015 a href wiki Template Cite web title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint archived copy as title link Frank D Bean Gillian Stevens 2003 America s Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity Russell Sage Foundation p 213 ISBN 978 1 61044 035 6 JSTOR 10 7758 9781610440356 Wilson Charles Reagan October 10 2017 Black Belt Prairie Mississippi Encyclopedia Retrieved August 23 2020 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 Charles S Bullock and M V Hood A Mile Wide Gap The Evolution of Hispanic Political Emergence in the Deep South Social Science Quarterly 87 5 2006 1117 1135 Online dead link Kevin Phillips The Emerging Republican Majority Updated Edition 2nd ed 2917 p 232 Michael Perman Pursuit of unity a political history of the American South U of North Carolina Press 2010 6 J Morgan Kousser The Shaping of Southern Politics Suffrage Restriction and the Rise of the One Party South 1880 1910 Yale UP 1974 Michael Perman Struggle for mastery Disfranchisement in the South 1888 1908 U of North Carolina Press 2003 Gabriel J Chin amp Randy Wagner The Tyranny of the Minority Jim Crow and the Counter Majoritarian Difficulty 43 Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review 65 2008 permanent dead link Valelly Richard M October 2 2009 The Two Reconstructions The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement University of Chicago Press ISBN 9780226845272 via Google Books Earl Black and Merle Black The rise of southern Republicans Harvard University Press 2009 Seth C McKee The Past Present and Future of Southern Politics 2012 online Google com See Matthew Yglesias Why did the South turn Republican Archived January 23 2017 at the Wayback Machine The Atlantic August 24 2007 Phillips p 255 Harvard Sitkoff Harry Truman and the Election of 1948 The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in American Politics Journal of Southern History 37 4 1971 597 616 Mark Stern Calculating visions Kennedy Johnson and civil rights Rutgers UP 1992 Brad Lockerbie Race and religion Voting behavior and political attitudes Social Science Quarterly 94 4 2013 1145 1158 Thomas J Sugrue It s Not Dixie s Fault The Washington Post July 17 2015 Charles S Bullock III and Mark J Rozell eds The New Politics of the Old South An Introduction to Southern Politics 2009 p 208 Table 33 Louisiana Race and Hispanic Origin 1810 to 1990 PDF Archived from the original PDF on March 27 2010 Race and Hispanic Origin for States PDF Archived from the original PDF on February 7 2014 Retrieved June 24 2013 Table 39 Mississippi Race and Hispanic Origin 1800 to 1990 PDF Archived from the original PDF on March 27 2010 Table 25 Georgia Race and Hispanic Origin 1790 to 1990 PDF Archived from the original PDF on October 23 2013 Retrieved June 24 2013 Table 15 Alabama Race and Hispanic Origin 1800 to 1990 PDF Archived from the original PDF on October 23 2013 Retrieved June 24 2013 Table 24 Florida Race and Hispanic Origin 1830 to 1990 PDF Archived from the original PDF on March 27 2010 Race and Hispanic Origin for States PDF Archived from the original PDF on January 20 2013 Retrieved June 24 2013 Race and Hispanic Origin for States PDF Archived from the original PDF on January 20 2013 Retrieved June 24 2013 Table 61 Virginia Race and Hispanic Origin 1790 to 1990 PDF Archived from the original PDF on March 27 2010 African Americans Archived July 25 2020 at the Wayback Machine Handbook of Texas Retrieved on December 17 2011 Maxine D Rogers et al Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood Florida in January 1923 December 1993 p 5 Rosewood Archived from the original on May 15 2008 Retrieved May 1 2008 March 28 2008 William H Frey The New Great Migration Black Americans Return to the South 1965 2000 The Brookings Institution May 2004 pp 1 5 Archived copy PDF Archived from the original PDF on April 28 2008 Retrieved May 19 2008 a href wiki Template Cite web title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint archived copy as title link accessed March 19 2008Further readingBlack Merle and Earl Black Deep South politics the enduring racial division in national elections doi 10 1093 oxfordhb 9780195381948 013 0018 Brown D Clayton King Cotton A Cultural Political and Economic History since 1945 University Press of Mississippi 2011 440 pp ISBN 978 1 60473 798 1 Davis Allison Deep South A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class 1941 classic case study from the late 1930s Dollard John Caste and Class in a Southern Town 1941 a classic case study Fite Gilbert C Cotton fields no more Southern agriculture 1865 1980 University Press of Kentucky 2015 Gulley Harold E Women and the lost cause Preserving a Confederate identity in the American Deep South Journal of historical geography 19 2 1993 125 141 Harris J William Deep Souths Delta Piedmont and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation 2003 Hughes Dudley J Oil in the Deep South A History of the Oil Business in Mississippi Alabama and Florida 1859 1945 University Press of Mississippi 1993 Key V O Southern Politics in State and Nation 1951 classic political analysis state by state online free to borrow Kirby Jack Temple Rural Worlds Lost The American South 1920 1960 Louisiana State University Press 1986 major scholarly survey with detailed bibliography online free to borrow Lang Clarence Locating the civil rights movement An essay on the Deep South Midwest and border South in Black Freedom Studies Journal of Social History 47 2 2013 371 400 Online Pierce Neal R The Deep South States of America People Politics and Power in the Seven States of the Deep South 1974 in depth study of politics and issues state by state Rogers William Warren et al Alabama The history of a deep south state University of Alabama Press 2018 Roller David C and Robert W Twyman eds The Encyclopedia of Southern History Louisiana State University Press 1979 Rothman Adam Slave Country American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South 2007 Thornton J Mills Politics and power in a slave society Alabama 1800 1860 1978 online free to borrow Vance Rupert B Regionalism and the South UNC Press Books 1982 Primary sources Carson Clayborne et al eds The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader Documents Speeches and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle Penguin 1991 784pp Johnson Charles S Statistical atlas of southern counties listing and analysis of socio economic indices of 1104 southern counties 1941 excerpt Raines Howell ed My soul is rested Movement days in the deep south remembered Penguin 1983