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This chapter examines how carceral power was articulated in the kitchenettes—small, tight, cramped spaces that many Black migrants in the Black Belt were forced to live in between World War I and World War II—and shaped identity formation. Drawing on the literature of Richard Wright, it considers how the police power that functioned in the public space of Chicago's Black Belt moved into the homes of Black migrants. Decades before carceral power made it into the academic lexicon, Wright used his fiction and nonfiction to document and understand the effect the geography of containment had on Black masculinity. For Wright, carceral power was used as a mechanism both to punish and to contain Blacks in the Black Belt. He used this analysis to bring attention to the injustices Blacks were confronted with and to develop his most-well-known literary character. The chapter looks at Wright's novel Native Son, which tackles the consequence of Black prisonization within urban geography.

This chapter examines how carceral power became a permanent fixture in Black Chicago during the Progressive Era. It documents the rise of policing in the Black Belt and shows how carceral power entered Black Chicago via attempts to control interracial sex and socializing in the Black/white sex districts on the South Side. The chapter first provides an overview of policing on Chicago's Black Belt as well as the geography of lynching and that of interracial social spaces in the city. It then considers the ways that policing of the Black Belt served as a mechanism to access and consolidate whiteness, organize the racial geography of the city, and for the Black middle class to push for the sexual regulation of Blacks. It also explores how interracial sex districts shaped Chicago's response to Black migration and the subsequent measures it took to control Black masculinity. Finally, it considers the role race scholars and Reconstruction discourses from the South played in framing and mobilizing the hysteria around interracial socializing and sex in Chicago.

This chapter provides a history of Black internationalist feminism. It begins with the intertwinings of Black nationalist and Old Left movements in the interwar years, with special attention to the Black Belt Nation Thesis, which produced political solidarities beyond the limited affiliations engendered and policed by U.S. liberal democracy. While putting the Black Belt Nation Thesis into practice entrenched Left masculinism more fully, several leading Black Communists transformed the meaning of self-determination to allow for intersectional analysis of race and gender and to address the “special oppressed status” of Black women. In doing so, African American Left women in particular paved the way for postwar Black feminism, which Claudia Jones definitively theorized. The chapter then demonstrates how the activism and analysis of African American women on the Old Left such as Maude White Katz and Louise Thompson Patterson laid grounds for postwar Black feminism.

This introductory chapter describes Black internationalist feminism. Black internationalist feminism challenged heteronormative and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance, even centrality, of national liberation movements for achieving Black women's social, political, and economic rights. As a corollary of the Communist Party's Black Belt Nation Thesis—which prioritized African American struggles for equality, justice, and self-determination—women of the Black Left asserted that Black women had special problems that could not be deferred or subsumed within the rubrics of working-class or Black oppression and that in fact were integral to the universal struggle for human rights and economic freedom. Moreover, women of the Black Left understood that essential to the liberation of African Americans, the Third World, and the worldwide proletariat was the fight against heteropatriarchy, which exacerbated oppression within as well as between nations.

This chapter traces the complex interplay of race, geography, and cultural criticism that permeated the Renaissance as a whole. Beginning with the categorization of the neighborhood as the Black Belt and ending with heralding itself as “Bronzeville,” the chapter examines the interaction of newly arrived migrants with previously settled African Americans that bloomed into an exciting community. It specifically analyzes two popular intersections in the South Side of Chicago—the “Stroll” district (the intersection of 35th and State Streets) during the early 1920s, and the intersection at 47th and South Parkway. This intersection, along with the Stroll, served as foundations and sources of work for famed African American musicians, artists, and writers, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks.

This chapter explores the formation of a “Black Metropolis” within Chicago by African Americans, who against the backdrop of racism wanted a land of their own. They used this metropolis to remember African soil and imagine themselves as a community. The chapter describes the Black Belt, a narrow strip where black professionals lived. Like their white neighbors in Back of the Yards, poor African Americans had to contend with unpleasant and dangerous environmental situations. Leisure afforded some escape from work, and like other foreigners, most African Americans enjoyed their leisure indoors. At the same time, many blacks also found refuge in green spaces such as parks. However, due to race restrictions they were prohibited from visiting these places. The chapter examines how through the 1919 Chicago race riots, African Americans secured greater control of urban, rural, and wild green spaces where they could temporarily retreat from urban life.

This chapter provides a historical background of Alabama's prairies followed by a list of prairies by county. Each site is briefly described, followed by symbols showing site features, a brief location, and a phone number. When Columbus discovered America, there was a mosaic of savanna and grassland extending along North America's Coastal Plain from southeastern Virginia to Texas and south Florida. The prairie vegetation covered about 1,000 square miles of Alabama, mostly in what in Alabama and Mississippi is called the Black Belt. The Black Belt is composed of two main environments: Black Belt (also called prairie, Blackland prairie, Chalk prairie or Black Belt prairie) and river bottomlands. White settlers transformed the Black Belt into the heart of the cotton kingdom. Now, less than 1 percent of the original Black Belt prairie remains.

This chapter provides a historical background of Mississippi's prairies followed by a list of prairies by county. Each site is briefly described, followed by symbols showing site features, a brief location, and a phone number. Plat maps (from General Land Office surveys conducted in the 1830s) show that prairies were most common in Madison and Rankin counties, and that a large number of prairies were found on alluvial soils in the Delta. In total, 19,555 hectares of prairie were marked on the plat maps. The Black Belt (Northeast Prairie Belt), which covered at least 17,700 acres, is one of two physiographic regions in Mississippi (and Alabama) known as the Blackland Prairies. The Black Belt holds three major plant communities: open prairie, chalk outcrop, and forest.

This chapter surveys the evolution of African American-owned businesses in Chicago from the mid-to-late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. During the nineteenth century, the most successful black entrepreneurs, such as tailor John Jones and caterer Charles H. Smiley, primarily served white clients. By the early twentieth century, as Chicago’s African American population grew, a new breed of black entrepreneur emerged. Even before the World War One “Great Migration,” persons such as newspaper editor Robert Abbott, real estate professional and banker Jesse Binga and personal care products manufacturer Anthony Overton saw the enormous profit potential associated with catering to the needs of the city’s burgeoning “Black Belt.”

In this chapter, Harry Haywood reflects on his work with the Sharecroppers Union to mobilize poor farmers in the deep, Black Belt South during the early 1930s. In the spring of 1933, Haywood Patterson of the Scottsboro Boys was declared guilty in relation to the alleged rape of two white girls in Alabama in 1931. His conviction sparked a a wave of indignation among Black communities across the country. Mass protest rallies, demonstrations of all sorts, and parades culminated in the Free the Scottsboro Boys March on Washington on May 7–9, 1933.

This chapter provides a historical background of Tennessee's prairies followed by a list of prairies by county. Each site is briefly described, followed by symbols showing site features, a brief location, and a phone number. Tennessee holds a region approximately 310 miles long and up to 25 miles wide, which includes habitats ranging from forest to a portion of Black Belt prairie. The Black Belt prairies are typically on well-drained, slowly permeable, alkaline soils in contrast to the Black Belt oak-hickory forest, associated with strongly acidic soils. Tennessee's prairies mostly disappeared more than a century ago, but some are being restored using prescribed burning, an essential management tool for this fire-dependent ecosystem. Because only a portion of the prairie is burned at one time, wildlife is not threatened. Barrens and glade communities are also found in Tennessee.

In this chapter, Harry Haywood talks about his role in the fight for the self-determination of all Blacks in the United States. Toward the end of 1927, N. Nasanov returned to the Soviet Union after a sojourn in the United States as the representative of the Young Communist International. Nasanov’s observations had convinced him that U.S. Blacks were essentially an oppressed nation whose struggle for equality would ultimately take an autonomous direction and that the content of the Black liberation movement was the completion of the agrarian and democratic revolution in the South. Therefore, it was the duty of the Communist Party of the United States to channel the movement in a revolutionary direction by raising and supporting the slogan of the right of self-determination for Afro-Americans in the Black Belt, the area of their greatest concentration. Haywood also believed that the path to freedom for Blacks led directly to socialism, uncluttered by any interim stage of self-determination or Black political power.

This chapter focuses on the “Little Pekin,” a theater opened by Robert T. Motts in Chicago in 1904. Chicago's black population around 1900 could not be called segregated in the modern sense of the term. It first provides an overview of the Black Belt, a neighborhood predominated by blacks, before discussing the role of social divisions among Chicago's black populace in the early history of Motts's theatrical venture. It then discusses the Pekin Theater, which Motts called “Temple of Music,” and its three elements that were to remain fundamental to its character: music, family, and vaudeville. It also considers the Pekin's strategy for racial uplift as part of Motts's commitment to his positive philosophy of economic activism. Finally, the chapter describes the entertainment that various performers offered at the Pekin on a nightly basis during its first seventeen months of operations, including bands playing ragtime as well as musical acts, comedians, dancers, acrobats, and other novelties.

This chapter focuses on Daniels's encounter with Victor C. Turner Sr., who worked for the Negro Cooperative Extension System of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Turner's biography as a representative of the educated black middle class is presented, including his participation in an officers' training program at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, during World War I. Turner told Daniels about racial violence and debt peonage in Lowndes County, Alabama, mentioning a planter named Dickson. Historical research connects a peonage case involving Lowndes County sheriff J.W. Dickson in 1903 with a case involving his younger brother, Robert Stiles Dickson Sr., in 1946. Neither brother was ever prosecuted, and the younger one was especially socially prominent. The chapter analyses Daniels's portrayal of Turner and Dickson, who remain anonymous in A Southerner Discovers the South. He sought confirmation of Turner's story from white Alabamans, including Birmingham newspaper editor James E. Chappell. Chappell's daughter Mary had taught at the Calhoun Colored School in Lowndes County and seemed to represent a new social consciousness among younger white southerners. However, another journalist's account of the suppression of the black Sharecroppers Union in 1932 reiterated that planter violence was endemic in the Alabama Black Belt.

This chapter studies Patterson's journey to Moscow. On November 14, 1927, Patterson was issued a U.S. passport and journeyed across the Atlantic for Moscow. His mission, as he put it, was to matriculate at the “University of Toiling People of the Far East,” whose student body was peppered with Chinese and Indians but also included Africans from throughout the world. “I was determined to have a complete house cleaning as regards capitalist thought and ideas,” said Patterson, and in this he succeeded. In 1928, he was to be found at an important gathering of the Communist International where cogitation on the critical Negro Question was a preoccupation and emerging was a logical corollary of the conflation of the problems of Africans, be they in North America or Africa itself—the so-called Black Belt thesis, or the idea that U.S. Negroes were entitled to self-determination, up to and including construction of a Negro republic in Dixie.

This chapter describes the outcome of for-profit's rule in Burke County, Georgia. Burke County is what the US Department of Agriculture calls a persistent-poverty county, meaning that for the past thirty years, over 20 percent of the population has lived in poverty. The designation is not an easy one to get. Only 11.2 percent of counties nationally register as that poor, for that long. And most of such counties are rural. Poverty has been even worse lately in Burke County: 33.5 percent of the county lives in poverty. The region is part of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the Black Belt, for both its soil and people, where plantations once littered the landscape, providing the template for the later tenant-farm structure.

This chapter analyzes Patterson's remark that “today the oppressed Negro people is seeking integration,” and that “the Negro people are an oppressed nation.” These remarks reflect a bitter internal party struggle that stretched from mid-1944 to mid-1945, leaving in its wake a momentous shift on the much discussed Negro Question, involving a retreat from the Black Belt line of self-determination, presumably since the Negroes were “seeking integration.” This complex and painful debate in mid-1945 was to result in the reinstatement of the old line—then another shift in 1956 in the aftermath of the conniptions caused by the invasion of Hungary and the revelations about Stalin's crimes. All the while, Patterson and his comrades continued grinding away against Jim Crow, though it was understandable that some thought their efforts had been sidetracked by abstruse polemics.