Entry · catalog no. 0176
Black Belt
/ /ˌblæk ˈbɛlt/ /BLAK BELT
noun · Central Alabama and northeast Mississippi; Chicago's South Side · 1900s
✓ Verified
1.
The Deep South agricultural region running in a crescent across central Alabama into northeast Mississippi, named for its dark soil and later, in ordinary usage, for the counties where Black people outnumbered white ones.
“He grew up in the Black Belt, three counties over from Tuskegee.”
2.
Chicago's segregated Black district on the South Side during and after the Great Migration — a container, not a neighborhood anyone chose. Originally a narrow corridor along State Street, later stretching south as the population grew and the covenants held.
“Everything they needed was in the Black Belt, because nothing was open to them outside it.”
Origin & Attribution
Two separate coinages, and they should not be collapsed. The Southern sense is not a Black coinage: it is white settler agricultural language from the 1820s and 1830s, naming the soil. Black speakers and Black writers inherited it and turned it, and Booker T. Washington documented the shift himself in 1901, writing that the term was first used for the color of the ground and later used wholly in a political sense, for the counties where Black people outnumbered whites. The Chicago sense is a separate Northern application from the 1910s onward, describing the district that restrictive covenants and violence built. Drake and Cayton's substitution of "Black Metropolis" in 1945 was a deliberate act of renaming.
1901
Booker T. Washington sets down the shift from soil to demography in Up from Slavery
1922
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations maps and defines the Chicago Black Belt in The Negro in Chicago, principally authored by the Black sociologist Charles S. Johnson
1945
Drake and Cayton publish Black Metropolis, deliberately renaming the district they document
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Central Alabama and northeast Mississippi; Chicago's South Side · 1900s
Spoken by
Black Southerners and Black sociologists, novelists and journalists documenting both regions
$BLACKBThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical125 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
42/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1901
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (Doubleday), ch. VII
1901
■
Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago (University of Chicago Press)
1922
■
+ Cite a sourceSt. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis (Harcourt, Brace)
1945
See also