Deep South
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. 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. Before 1945, the Deep South was often referred to as the "Cotton States" since cotton was the primary cash crop for economic production.[1][2] 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 currently a Republican Party stronghold.
This article is about the region of the United States. For other uses, see Deep South (disambiguation).
Deep South
Origins[edit]
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. 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.[10] This was the part of the South many considered the "most Southern."[11]
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 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."[9]
Early economics[edit]
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.[12][13]
Climate[edit]
As part of the Sun Belt, the Deep South tends to have Temperate and Subtropical climates with long hot summers and short mild winters. The climate tends to display more pronounced Subtropical characteristics the closer you get to the coast. Due to its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, hurricanes are also a frequently-occurring natural disaster.
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. [16][17] 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:
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.[18]
As of 2003, the majority of Black Americans in the South live in the Black Belt in the American South from Virginia to Texas.[19][20]
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.[21]
States[edit]
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[39]), South Carolina (until the 1920s[40]), and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s[41]). In the same period, Georgia,[42] Alabama,[43] and Florida[44] had populations that were nearly 50% black, while Maryland,[45] North Carolina,[46] and Virginia[47] had black populations approaching or exceeding 40%. Texas' black population reached 30%.[48]
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.[49] 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.[50]
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.[50]