Deep South

The plantation belt, founded as an extension of the West Indies rather than of England. Barbadian planters settled Charleston in 1670 and brought the island's slave code with them fully formed, so the harshest legal regime in the English Atlantic arrived in North America ready-made rather than developing locally. Rice and indigo made the lowcountry rich, drawing on West African expertise, and cotton then carried the system west across Alabama, Mississippi and into Texas after the gin made short-staple cotton profitable. The society that resulted was explicitly hierarchical, with a small planter class, a large enslaved majority in many counties, and poor whites whose position depended on the racial line. That structure produced secession first in South Carolina, the constitutional theories of nullification and states' rights, and after Reconstruction a legal system of segregation and disenfranchisement that lasted until federal intervention in the 1960s. The region's church life, cuisine and music - blues, gospel, jazz, rock and country all have roots here - are among the most influential American exports. Its politics remain distinctive. The Black Belt's name describes its soil. The region covers the lowcountry, the Black Belt and the cotton lands west to east Texas. Its historically Black colleges were founded after emancipation and remain central institutions. Gullah Geechee communities on the Sea Islands retain a distinct creole language. Air conditioning transformed the region's economy and population after 1950. Atlanta is now its largest city and the region’s commercial capital. The Great Migration took several million people out of it northward.

• Existed: 1670 CE – present
• Type: Entity