A black-soil corridor perhaps 25 miles wide, the Black Belt links 623 of the South's 1,104 counties. From southern Virginia into the Carolinas and Georgia, it crisscrosses Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. A hub of cotton in slavery, of sharecropping and Jim Crow after emancipation, it remains largely rural.

Today blacks comprise 27 percent of its population. It evinces some of the highest rates of illiteracy, unemployment, poverty, disease, and infant mortality in the United States. It is known for its violent racism; white and black cultures, including bluegrass, blues, jazz, and gospel music; and out-migrations. Black Belt whites spearheaded “massive resistance” to Brown and the civil rights movement.