deep South

File:2020 Census - Majority-Black Counties in the United States.png]]

The term "Deep South" is defined in a various ways, but most definitions typically include the states: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.{{cite web|title=Deep South|work=The Free Dictionary|url=http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Deep+South|access-date=May 25, 2018|archive-date=November 8, 2017|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171108165349/http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Deep+South|url-status=live}} Texas and Florida are sometimes included as well,Neal R. Pierce, The Deep South States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Seven States of the Deep South (1974), pp 123–61 due to their proximity, coastlines with the Gulf of Mexico, histories of slavery, large African American populations, and their former status as part of the Confederate States of America.

The eastern part of Texas is the westernmost extension of the Deep South, typically the area east of Dallas.{{Cite web |title=Anglo-American Colonization |url=https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/anglo-american-colonization |access-date=2022-05-15 |website=Texas State Historical Association |archive-date=July 25, 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220725095319/https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/anglo-american-colonization |url-status=live }} North Florida is also part of the Deep South region, typically the area north of Ocala.{{cite journal |last1=Solomon |first1=Irvin |title=Race And Civil War In South Florida |journal=Florida Historical Quarterly |date=1998 |volume=77 |issue=3 |pages=320–341 |url=https://stars.library.ucf.edu/fhq/vol77/iss3/5/ |jstor=30147583 }} West Tennessee is sometimes included due to its history of slavery, its prominence in cotton production during the antebellum period,{{cite web |last=Randal Rust |title=Cotton |url=https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/cotton/ |access-date=March 22, 2022 |website=Tennessee Encyclopedia |language=en-US}} and cultural similarity to the Mississippi Delta region.{{cite web |title=History and Culture of the Mississippi Delta Region - Lower Mississippi Delta Region (U.S. National Park Service) |url=https://www.nps.gov/locations/lowermsdeltaregion/history-and-culture-of-the-mississippi-delta-region.htm |access-date=March 22, 2022 |website=www.nps.gov}} The Arkansas Delta is also sometimes included,{{cite book|editor=Williard B. Gatewood Jr.|editor2= Jeannie M. Whayne|title=The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZWI2SXH20QAC&pg=PA3|year=1996|publisher=University of Arkansas Press|page=3|isbn=978-1-61075-032-5}} though Arkansas is usually considered part of the Upper South.{{cite book|author1=Diane D. Blair|author2=Jay Barth|title=Arkansas Politics and Government|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=0iBvLIkf7AoC&pg=PA66|year=2005|publisher=University of Nebraska Press|page=66|isbn=0-8032-0489-2}}

Seven states seceded from the United States before the firing on Fort Sumter and the start of the American Civil War, which 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 percentage of slaves. Ultimately, the Confederacy included eleven states. A large part of the original "Cotton Belt" is sometimes included in Deep South terminology. This was considered to extend from the South Carolina Lowcountry to Georgia and North Florida, through the Gulf States as far west as East Texas, including West Tennessee, eastern Arkansas, and up the Mississippi embayment.John Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, Doubleday, 1996 Historically, sugar was the predominant crop in Louisiana, and rice was an important crop in South Carolina.

The inner core of the Deep South, characterized by very rich black soil that supported cotton plantations, is a geological formation known as the Black Belt. The Black Belt has since become better known as a sociocultural region; in this context it is a term used for much of the Cotton Belt, which had a high percentage of African-American slave labor. The Mississippi Delta has been called "The Most Southern Place on Earth", because of its unique racial, cultural, and economic history.James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (1992)

File:Slavery in the 13 colonies.jpg in 1770, showing the number of slaves in each colonyIra Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003) pp. 272–276.]]

The colony of South Carolina was dominated by a planter class who initially migrated from the British Caribbean island of Barbados, and used the Barbados Slave Code of 1661 as a model to control and terrorize the African American slave population.Joseph Hall, [http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-03/no-01/reviews/hall.shtml "The Great Indian Slave Caper", review of Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20161009142917/http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-03/no-01/reviews/hall.shtml |date=October 9, 2016 }}, Common-place, vol. 3, no. 1 (October 2002), accessed 5 March 2017. Barbados provided a steady flow of sugar produced by slave labor to Europe and North America.{{cite book|author=Richard B. Sheridan|title=Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1775|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QUV98bwrqscC&pg=PA415|year=1974|publisher=Canoe Press|pages=415–26|isbn=9789768125132 }} The Georgia colony was initially founded by James Oglethorpe as a buffer state to defend the southern British colonies from Spanish Florida. Oglethorpe imagined a province populated by "sturdy farmers" who could guard the border; because of this, the colony's charter prohibited slavery. Unfortunately, the ban on slavery was lifted by 1751, and the colony became a royal colony in 1752.{{Cite web |url=https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/royal-georgia-1752-1776 |title=Royal Georgia, 1752-1776 |website=New Georgia Encyclopedia |language=en |access-date=2018-07-24 |archive-date=July 24, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180724213431/https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/royal-georgia-1752-1776 |url-status=live }}

At the time of the American Revolution, South Carolina and Georgia were majority African American, as indicated by the map on the right. In 1765, London philanthropist Dr. John Fothergill remarked on the cultural differences of the British American colonies southward from Maryland and those to the north, suggesting that Southerners were more similar to the people of the Caribbean than to the colonies to the north. A visiting French dignitary concurred in 1810 that American customs seemed "entirely changed" over the Potomac River, and that Southern society resembled those of the Caribbean.{{cite book |last1=James C. Cobb |title=Away Down South A History of Southern Identity |date=2005 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=9780198025016 |pages=10–12}}

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. At the time of the American Civil War, Florida and Texas were sparsely populated and not fully settled, with Florida and Texas being the least-populated and third least-populated of the 11 Confederate states, respectively.{{cite web |url=https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html#y1860 |title=1860 Census of Population and Housing |publisher=Census.gov |date=January 7, 2009 |access-date=August 29, 2010 |archive-date=July 19, 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180719124258/https://www.census.gov//prod/www/decennial.html#y1860 |url-status=live }}

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.Roller, David C., and Twyman, Robert W., editors (1979). The Encyclopedia of Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. This was the part of the South many considered the "most Southern."James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (1992) p. vii. In 1939, Florida was described as "still very largely an empty State," with only North Florida largely settled until after World War II.{{cite book|title=Florida. A Guide to the Southernmost State|date=1939|place=New York|author=Federal Writers' Project|publisher=Oxford University Press|page=7}}

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 Eastern Arkansas, 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."

File:Black Americans 1860 County.png

The Deep South is generally associated historically with cotton production. The 11 Confederate States, including the Deep South, were overwhelmingly rural. New Orleans, Louisiana was the only populous city in the Confederacy during the Civil War.

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.Ted Ownby, "The Defeated Generation at Work: White Farmers in the Deep South, 1865–1890". Southern Studies 23 (1984): 325–347.Edward L. Ayers, The promise of the new South: Life after reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2007) 187–214, 283–289.

{{ multiple image |total_width=450 |title=Ecoregions associated with the Deep South

| image1= Pinus taeda distribution map.png| caption1= Natural range of loblolly pine, which covers most of the Deep South and Tidewater.

| image2 = Mississippi delta disambig.svg|caption2=The Mississippi Alluvial Plain created by the Mississippi River.}}

By 1850, the term "Cotton States" was in common use, and the differences between the Deep South (lower) and Upland South (upper) were recognized. A key difference was the Deep South's plantation-style cash crop agriculture (mainly cotton, rice and sugar), using the forced labor of enslaved African Americans on large farms while plantation owners tended to live in towns and cities. This system of plantation farming was originally developed in the Caribbean West Indies and introduced to the United States in South Carolina and Louisiana, from where it spread throughout the Deep South, although there were local exceptions wherever conditions did not support the system. The sharp division between town and country, the intensive use of a few cash crops, and the high proportion of slaves, all differed from the Upland South.For Antebellum differences between the Upper South and Lower South, see Meinig (1998) pp. 222–224

The Tidewater region, encompassing the Chesapeake Bay and Eastern North Carolina, stands out as different from both the Deep South and Upland South. Its history of slavery originated in Virginia and predated the Caribbean plantation model, relying on tobacco as a cash crop from the start. Tidewater had few urban centers, instead establishing multiple markets along tributaries. Cotton and rice operations were large and factory-like, while tobacco profits hinged on skilled, careful, and efficient labor units.{{Cite web |title=Colonial Virginia |url=https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/colonial-virginia/ |access-date=2021-05-12 |website=Encyclopedia Virginia |language=en-US |archive-date=August 30, 2024 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20240830135128/https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/colonial-virginia/ |url-status=live }}

Despite being the southernmost part of the continental United States, South Florida is not considered part of the Deep South. It has a tropical climate and high levels of migration from the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly in the densely populated Miami metropolitan area.{{cite web|url=http://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/gone-viral/os-state-of-south-florida-20141021-post.html|title=Officials want South Florida to break off into its own state|first=Adrienne|last=Cutway|website=Orlandosentinel.com|date=21 October 2014 |access-date=10 July 2018}}{{cite web |url=http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/21/new-state-south-florida/17673069/ |title=Officials want to create 51st state in South Florida |access-date=2014-10-22 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://archive.today/20141022020503/http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/21/new-state-south-florida/17673069/ |archive-date=2014-10-22 }}

{{further|African-American history|Racism against Black Americans|Racism in the United States}}

After 1950, the region became a major center of the Civil Rights Movement, including: the work of Martin Luther King Jr., the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the 1964 Freedom Summer.Clarence Lang, "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. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/43305919 Online].Howell Raines, My soul is rested: Movement days in the deep south remembered (Penguin, 1983).

The Deep South has three major Metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) located solely within its boundaries, with populations exceeding 1,000,000 residents (Four including Memphis). Atlanta, the 6th largest metro area in the United States, is the Deep South's largest population center, followed by New Orleans and Birmingham.

The 16 Deep South metropolitan areas (MSAs) within the 150 largest population centers in the United States are ranked below:

* Indicates state capital

Other substantial cities include:

Other cities sometimes included as part of the Deep South:

*

{{ multiple image

|total_width=450|title=Geographic regions associated with the Deep South

| image1= Atlantic Plain Continental Shelf.jpg|caption1= Extent of the Atlantic Plain Continental Shelf province as indicated by the 1928 work by Fenneman.

| image2 = The_range_of_the_American_Alligator.png|caption2=Approximate range of the American alligator.}}

As part of the Sun Belt and Atlantic Plain, the Deep South tends to have a Subtropical climate with long hot summers and short mild winters. The 35th parallel north, which is used to define the northern boundary of the subtropics, defines the southern border of Tennessee, and the border between North Carolina and Georgia.

The climate tends to display more pronounced Subtropical characteristics the closer one gets to the Gulf Coast. For example, the Deep South substantially overlaps with the range of the American alligator.

Crops grow readily in the Deep South due to its climate consistently providing growing seasons of at least six months before the first frost. Some common environments include bayous and swamplands, as well as the southern pine forests. Due to its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, hurricanes are also a frequently-occurring natural disaster.

Booker T. Washington wrote in his 1901 autobiography{{cite book |last=Washington |first=Booker T. |date=1901 |title=Up From Slavery |url=https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/92/up-from-slavery/1600/chapter-7-early-days-at-tuskegee/ |accessdate=January 26, 2020}}

I have often been asked to define the term "Black Belt". So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense—that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white.

File:Census-2000-Data-Top-US-Ancestries-by-County.svg

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. Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (1989)David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989) pp 605–757. 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:

• Alabama – 857,864 of 2,165,653 respondents (41%) self-identified as English only, which was the state's largest ancestral group by a wide margin.
• Georgia – 1,132,184 of 3,009,486 respondents (37.62%) self-identified as English only.
• Mississippi – 496,481 of 1,551,364 respondents (32%) self-identified as English only, which was the state's largest ancestral group by a wide margin.
• Florida – 1,132,033 of 5,159,967 respondents (21.94%) self-identified as English only.
• Louisiana – 480,711 of 2,319,259 respondents (20.73%) self-identified as French only, followed closely by 440,558 English-only respondents (19%).
• South Carolina – 578,338 of 1,706,966 respondents (33.88%) self-identified as English only. This is likely due to the fact that British colonization along the coasts of present-day South Carolina began earlier than colonization of other areas commonly classified as the Deep South.
• Texas – 1,639,322 of 7,859,393 respondents (20.86%) self-identified as English only, which was the state's largest ancestral group by a large margin.

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.{{Cite web |url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/files/pc80-s1-10/tab03a.pdf |title=Archived copy |access-date=October 26, 2015 |archive-date=October 26, 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20191026113708/https://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/files/pc80-s1-10/tab03a.pdf |url-status=dead }}

{{As of|2003}}, the majority of Black Americans in the South live in the Black Belt in the American South from Virginia to Texas.{{cite book |title=America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity |url=https://archive.org/details/americasnewcomer00fran |url-access=registration |author=Frank D. Bean |author-link=Frank D. Bean |author2=Gillian Stevens|page=[https://archive.org/details/americasnewcomer00fran/page/213 213] |isbn=978-1-61044-035-6 |jstor=10.7758/9781610440356|year=2003 |publisher=Russell Sage Foundation}}{{cite encyclopedia|url=https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/black-belt-prairie/|title=Black Belt/Prairie |encyclopedia=Mississippi Encyclopedia| last=Wilson|first=Charles Reagan|quote="The Mississippi Black Belt is part of a larger region, stretching from Virginia south to the Carolinas and west through the Deep South, defined by a majority African American population and a long history of cotton production."|date=10 October 2017|access-date=23 August 2020}}

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.Charles S. Bullock, and M. V. Hood, "A Mile‐Wide Gap: The Evolution of Hispanic Political Emergence in the Deep South." Social Science Quarterly 87.5 (2006): 1117–1135. [https://www.academia.edu/download/50056086/j.1540-6237.2006.00419.x20161102-6575-1ckeysq.pdf Online]{{dead link|date=July 2022|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}

File:U.S. 1960 to 1964 presidential election swing.svg. The 5 Deep South states, along with Northern Florida, had the strongest swings to Republican nominee Barry Goldwater. Note that Texas was the home state of Democratic nominee Lyndon B. Johnson.]]

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."Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority: Updated Edition (2nd ed. 2917) p. 232.

From the late 1870s to the mid-1960s, conservative whites of the Deep South held control of state governments and overwhelmingly identified with and supported the Democratic Party.Michael Perman, Pursuit of unity: a political history of the American South (U of North Carolina Press, 2010). The most powerful leaders belonged to the party's moderate-to-conservative wing. The Republican Party would only control mainly mountain districts in Southern Appalachia, on the fringe of the Deep South, during the "Solid South" period.6 J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Rise of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (Yale UP, 1974).

At the turn of the 20th century, all 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.Michael Perman, Struggle for mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (U of North Carolina Press, 2003). The white Democratic-dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to impose white supremacy, including caste segregation of public facilities.Gabriel J. Chin & Randy Wagner, "The Tyranny of the Minority: Jim Crow and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty, "[https://ssrn.com/abstract=963036&high=%20Gabriel%20CHin 43 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 65 (2008)]{{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} 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 mainly 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 only represented the richer subset of their white populations.{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=V4__EYITWk4C&q=Effects+of+southern+black+disfranchisement+on+1912+presidential+election&pg=PA128|title=The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement|first=Richard M.|last=Valelly|date=October 2, 2009|publisher=University of Chicago Press|isbn=9780226845272|via=Google Books}} In the 1928 presidential election, Al Smith received serious backlash as a Catholic, but carried all 5 Deep South states, though he nearly lost Alabama.

Major demographic changes would ensue in the 20th century. During the two waves of the Great Migration (1916–1970), 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. 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 the Republican Party. They still would vote for many Democrats at the state and local level into the 1990s.Earl Black and Merle Black, The rise of southern Republicans (Harvard University Press, 2009). 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."Seth C. McKee, [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&sxsrf=ALeKk03oxBRxxcJ_bhCvSFUcwipwYuxBrQ%3A1582209399544&ei=d5lOXujsIJLZ9APZ54KYCw&q=%22Especially+their+Black+belt+counties%22+inauthor%3Amckee&oq=%22Especially+their+Black+belt+counties%22+inauthor%3Amckee&gs_l=psy-ab.3...25231.26678.0.27181.17.5.0.0.0.0.137.467.3j2.5.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..14.0.0....0.IsWoYDnoam8 The Past, Present, and Future of Southern Politics (2012) online]. Google.com

White southern voters consistently voted for the Democratic Party for many years to hold onto Jim Crow Laws. Once Franklin D. Roosevelt came to power in 1932, the limited southern electorate found itself supporting Democratic candidates who frequently did not share its views. Journalist Matthew Yglesias argues:

{{blockquote|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.See [https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/08/why-did-the-south-turn-republican/45956/ Matthew Yglesias, "Why did the South turn Republican?"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170123113932/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/08/why-did-the-south-turn-republican/45956/ |date=January 23, 2017 }}, The Atlantic August 24, 2007.}}

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.

In the 1968 election, George Wallace carried all five Deep South states except for South Carolina, as well as Arkansas. 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.Phillips, p. 255

The Republican Party in the South had been crippled by the disenfranchisement of blacks, and the national party was unable to relieve their past with the South where Reconstruction was negatively viewed. 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.Harvard Sitkoff, "Harry Truman and the Election of 1948: The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in American Politics." Journal of Southern History 37.4 (1971): 597–616 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.Mark Stern, Calculating visions: Kennedy, Johnson, and civil rights (Rutgers UP, 1992). Since then, upwards of 90 percent of African Americans in the South have voted for the Democratic Party,Brad Lockerbie, "Race and religion: Voting behavior and political attitudes." Social Science Quarterly 94.4 (2013): 1145–1158. including 93 percent for Obama in 2012.

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.[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-not-dixies-fault/2015/07/17/7bf77a2e-2bd6-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html Thomas J. Sugrue, "It's Not Dixie's Fault"], The Washington Post, July 17, 2015 Since then, white Deep South voters have tended to vote for Republican candidates in most presidential elections. Times the Democratic Party has won in the Deep South since the late 20th century include: 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, 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. The incumbent Speaker of the House since October 2023, Republican Mike Johnson, is from Louisiana.

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 Deep South 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.

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 the 2008 Republican primaries, losing only one state (South Carolina) while running (he had dropped out of the race before the Mississippi primary).Charles S. Bullock III and Mark J. Rozell, eds. The New Politics of the Old South: An Introduction to Southern Politics (2009) p 208.

Except for Georgia, the Deep South is strongly Republican. Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina have voted Republican for president in every presidential election since 2000. Georgia is the most populous and urbanized Deep South state.

Georgia is currently considered a Swing state. In 2020, the state of Georgia was considered a toss-up state hinting at a possible Democratic shift in the area. It ultimately voted Democratic, in favor of Joe Biden. During the 2021 January Senate runoff elections, Georgia also voted for two Democrats, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, with Warnock winning re-election to a full term the following year. In 2024, Republican Donald Trump won the state by a 2.2% margin.

• Republicans currently hold every Georgia statewide office, its state Supreme Court, and its state legislature.

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{{cite web | url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab33.pdf | title=Table 33. Louisiana – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1810 to 1990 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100327164251/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab33.pdf | archive-date=2010-03-27}}), South Carolina (until the 1920s{{cite web |url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab55.pdf |title=Race and Hispanic Origin for States |access-date=2013-06-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140207234436/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab55.pdf |archive-date=February 7, 2014 |url-status=dead }}), and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s{{cite web | url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab39.pdf | title=Table 39. Mississippi – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1800 to 1990 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100327164055/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab39.pdf | archive-date=2010-03-27}}). In the same period, Georgia,{{cite web |url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab25.pdf |title=Table 25. Georgia – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990 |access-date=2013-06-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131023104229/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab25.pdf |archive-date=October 23, 2013 |url-status=dead }} Alabama,{{cite web |url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab15.pdf |title=Table 15. Alabama – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1800 to 1990 |access-date=2013-06-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131023102631/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab15.pdf |archive-date=October 23, 2013 |url-status=dead }} and Florida{{cite web | url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab24.pdf | title=Table 24. Florida – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1830 to 1990 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100327163939/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab24.pdf | archive-date=2010-03-27}} had populations that were nearly 50% black, while Maryland,{{cite web |url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab35.pdf |title=Race and Hispanic Origin for States |access-date=2013-06-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130120083102/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab35.pdf |archive-date=January 20, 2013 |url-status=dead }} North Carolina,{{cite web |url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab48.pdf |title=Race and Hispanic Origin for States |access-date=2013-06-24 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130120030725/http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab48.pdf |archive-date=January 20, 2013 |url-status=dead }} and Virginia{{cite web | url=https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab61.pdf | title=Table 61. Virginia – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100327164156/https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/tab61.pdf | archive-date=2010-03-27}} had black populations approaching or exceeding 40%. Texas' black population reached 30%."[http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pkaan African Americans] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200725003833/https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/pkaan |date=July 25, 2020 }}". Handbook of Texas. Retrieved on December 17, 2011.

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.Maxine D. Rogers, et al., Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida in January 1923, December 1993, p. 5 {{cite web |url=http://mailer.fsu.edu/~mjones/rosewood/rosewood.html |title=Rosewood |access-date=2008-05-01 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080515152951/http://mailer.fsu.edu/~mjones/rosewood/rosewood.html |archive-date=May 15, 2008 }}, March 28, 2008 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.

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.William H. Frey, "The New Great Migration: Black Americans' Return to the South, 1965–2000", The Brookings Institution, May 2004, pp. 1–5 {{cite web|url=http://www.brookings.edu/urban/pubs/20040524_Frey.pdf |title=Archived copy |access-date=2008-05-19 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080428042235/http://www.brookings.edu/urban/pubs/20040524_Frey.pdf |archive-date=April 28, 2008 }}, accessed March 19, 2008

• U.S. Route 90 runs from Van Horn, Texas to Jacksonville, Florida.
• U.S. Route 11 runs through the Deep South to the Canadian border in New York.
• Interstate 10 is a major transcontinental east–west highway that travels through the far southern portion of the Deep South, with its eastern terminus at I-95 in Jacksonville, Florida.
• Interstate 55 is a major north–south route traveling from Chicago, Illinois to New Orleans, Louisiana. The interstate travels through the Deep South cities of Memphis, Jackson, and New Orleans.
• Interstate 40 is a major transcontinental east–west route that travels from Barstow, California to Wilmington, North Carolina. It meets Interstate 55 in Memphis.
• Interstate 49 is a partially complete interstate running north–south centrally in the United States. It runs currently in the Deep South from Texarkana, Arkansas through Shreveport, and Alexandria to Lafayette, Louisiana.
• Interstate 20 runs from West Texas to Florence, South Carolina. It travels through the Deep South cities of Tyler, Shreveport, Jackson, Birmingham, Atlanta, Augusta, and Columbia.
• Interstate 75 runs from Chattanooga, Tennessee through Georgia down to Miami, Florida.

{{reflist}}

• 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 (University Press 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 (University Press of Mississippi, 1993).
• Key, V.O. Southern Politics in State and Nation (1951) classic political analysis, state by state. [https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28Statistical%20atlas%20of%20southern%20counties%29 online free to borrow]
• Kirby, Jack Temple. Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920–1960 (Louisiana State University Press, 1986) major scholarly survey with detailed bibliography; [https://archive.org/details/ruralworldslosta0000kirb 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. [https://www.jstor.org/stable/43305919 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) [https://archive.org/details/politicspowerins0000thor online free to borrow]
• Vance, Rupert B. Regionalism and the South (UNC Press Books, 1982).

• Carson, Clayborne et al. eds. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle (Penguin, 1991), 784pp.
• Johnson, Charles S. Statistical atlas of southern counties: listing and analysis of socio-economic indices of 1104 southern counties (1941). [https://books.google.com/books/about/Statistical_Atlas_of_Southern_Counties_L.html?id=ATjQAAAAMAAJ excerpt]
• Raines, Howell, ed. My soul is rested: Movement days in the deep south remembered (Penguin, 1983).

{{Regions of the United States}}

Category:Politics of the Southern United States

Category:Regions of the Southern United States

Category:Culture of the Southern United States