Deep South

Southern Black Belt counties with an African-American population 40% or higher.

The term Deep South is defined in a variety of ways:

• Most definitions include the states Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana.[3]
• Texas and Florida are sometimes included,[4] due to being peripheral states, having coastlines with the Gulf of Mexico, their history of slavery and as being part of the historical Confederate States of America. The eastern part of Texas is the westernmost extension of the Deep South while North Florida is also a part of the Deep South region, typically that area north of Ocala.[3]
• Arkansas is sometimes included[4][5] or else considered "in the Peripheral or Rim South rather than the Deep South."[6]
• The seven states that seceded from the United States before the firing on Fort Sumter and the start of the American Civil War, and who 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 number of slaves. Ultimately the Confederacy included eleven states.
• A large part of the original "Cotton Belt". This was considered to extend from eastern North Carolina to South Carolina and through the Gulf States as far west as East Texas, and including those parts of western Tennessee and eastern Arkansas in the Mississippi embayment.[7] Some of this is coterminous with the Black Belt, a term used for much of the Cotton Belt, which had a high percentage of African-American slave labor.
• Studies of the Civil Rights Movement often highlight the region. Thus in 2012 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." [8]

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 Georgia, southern Alabama, northern Florida, Mississippi, northern Louisiana, southern Arkansas, and eastern Texas, all historically areas of cotton plantations and slavery.[9] This was the part of the South many considered the "most Southern".[10]

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 East Texas and North Florida. In its broadest application today, 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".[7]

After the Civil War, the region was poor. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, a small fraction of the white population comprised the wealthy landowners, merchants and bankers who 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, their 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. There was some out-migration, especially to Texas, but generally the population grew relentlessly and the farms were subdivided smaller and smaller. Growing discontent helped give rise to the Populist movement around 1890. It represented a sort of class warfare, in which the poor farmers were the losers.[11][12]

Race relations were tense and white supremacy was a significant factor as imposed by the white Redeemers after 1877.[13] The 1200 lynchings in the Deep South in the 1880-1930 half-century comprised a majority of all American lynchings.[14] After 1950, the region became a major locale for the civil rights movement, including: the emergence of a young (25), new pastor of a local church, Martin Luther King Jr., during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott; the 1960 founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and the 1964 Freedom Summer.[15][16]

The Deep South is home to seven major combined statistical areas (CSAs) with populations exceeding 1,000,000 residents. The inclusion of these cities and exclusion of others is subject to geographic and historic definitions of the region. Houston the 8th largest CSA and Atlanta the 11th largest CSA in the United States, are the Deep South's largest population centers.

2000 Census Population Ancestry Map, with African-American ancestry in purple.

In the 1980 census, of those people who identified solely by one European national ancestry, most European Americans identified as being of English ancestry in every Southern state except Louisiana, where more people identified as having French ancestry.[17][18] A significant number also have Irish and Scotch-Irish ancestry.

With regards to people in the Deep South who reported only a single European-American ancestry group in 1980, the census showed the following self-identification in each state in this region:

• Alabama – 857,864 persons out of a total of 2,165,653 people in the state identified as "English," making them 41% of the state and the largest national ancestry group at the time by a wide margin.
• Georgia – 1,132,184 out of 3,009,484 people identified as "English," making them 37.62% of the state's total.
• Mississippi – 496,481 people out of 1,551,364 people identified as "English," making them 32.00% of the total, the largest national group by a wide margin.
• Florida – 1,132,033 people out of 5,159,967 identified "English" as their only ancestry group, making them 21.94% of the total.
• Louisiana – 440,558 people out of 2,319,259 people identified only as "English," making them 19.00% of the total people and the second-largest ancestry group in the state at the time. Those who wrote only "French" were 480,711 people out of 2,319,259 people, or 20.73% of the total state population.
• South Carolina – 578,338 people out of 1,706,966 identified as "English," making them 33.88% of the total at the time.
• Texas – 1,639,322 people identified as "English" only out of a total of 7,859,393 people, making them 20.86% of the total people in the state and the largest ancestry group by a large margin.

These figures do not take into account people who identified as "English" and another ancestry group. When the two were added together, people who self-identified as being of English with other ancestry made up an even larger portion of southerners.[19] South Carolina was settled earlier than those states commonly classified as the Deep South. Its population in 1980 included 578,338 people out of 1,706,966 people in the state who identified as "English" only, making them 33.88% of the total population, the largest national ancestry group by a large margin.

The map to the right was prepared by the Census Bureau from the 2000 census; it shows the predominant ancestry in each county as self-identified by residents themselves. Note: The Census said that areas with the largest "American"-identified ancestry populations were mostly settled by descendants of colonial English and others from the British Isles, French, Germans and later Italians. Those with African ancestry tended to identify as African American, although most African Americans also have British or Northern European ancestors.[20]

As of 2003, the majority of African-descended Americans in the South live in the Black Belt geographic area.[21]

Hispanic and Latino Americans started arriving in the Deep South in the 1990s, and the numbers have grown rapidly. Politically they have not been very active; most are not yet citizens.[22]

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."[23]

From the 1870s to the early 1960s, conservative whites of the Deep South held control of state governments and overwhelmingly identified as and supported the old version of the Democratic Party.[24] The most powerful leaders belonged to the party's moderate-to-conservative wing. The Republicans also controlled many mountain districts on the fringe of the Deep South.[25]

At the turn of the 20th century, all of the 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.[26] The white Democratic-dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to impose white supremacy, including caste segregation of public facilities.[27] 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 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 represented only the richer subset of their white populations.[28]

Major demographic changes ensued in the 20th century; during the two waves of the Great Migration, 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. In some areas, white migration increased into the South, especially dating from the late 20th century. 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 Republicans. They still voted for many Democrats at the state and local level into the 1990s.[29]

The Republican Party in the South had been crippled by the disenfranchisement of blacks, and the national party was unable to relieve their injustices in the South. 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.[30] 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.[31] Since then, upwards of ninety percent of African Americans in the South and the rest of the nation have voted for the Democratic Party,[32] including 93 percent for Obama in 2012 and 88 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016.[33]

In the 2020 Presidential Election, the state of Georgia was considered a toss up state hinting at a possible Democratic shift in the area.

White southern voters consistently voted for the Democratic Party for many years to hold onto Jim Crow Laws. Once Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to power in 1932, however, 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. [34]

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.[23]

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.[35]

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.[36] Since then, white Southern voters have voted for Republican candidates in every presidential election except in 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, and 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.

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 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.[37]

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 2008 Republican primaries, losing only one state (South Carolina) while running (he had dropped out of the race before the Mississippi primary).[38]

• Bible Belt
• Dixie
• Republic of New Afrika

• 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 (UP 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 (Univ. 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 (LSU 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).