Introduction

This is the Black Belt. Extending from Tidewater Virginia down theCoast of the Carolinas, and westward across Central Georgia and Alabama to the Mississippi Delta, the Black Belt stretches up throughMississippi and Louisiana into Tennessee and Arkansas. It also touchesFlorida and Texas.

This unique concentration is not fortuitous. It is traceable to the oldplantation system and its primary crop: cotton. Vestiges of the oldway of life continue to mark the land and its people. Descendants ofthe Negro slaves who worked the fields and served the white landholdercontinue to constitute a substantial portion of the population. Cottonand other agricultural products are still cultivated within a plantationstructure now characterized by large land holdings subdivided into smallunits for operation by tenant farmers and by sharecroppers. Historically cotton and the Negro went together in the Black Belt. Thisis still the case, though in diminishing degree. Not all cotton countiesmay now be denominated black belt, and not all black belt counties arecotton counties2014yet; it is still true that few cotton counties have a smallproportion of Negroes and only a scattering of others have a large one.

The Commission's attention first turned to the Black Belt in 1959when its voting studies revealed that 16 (now 13) counties with amajority of Negroes had no Negroes registered to vote; and that in 35other such counties 3 percent or less of the Negroes of voting age wereregistered. In 1950 there were 158 Negro-majority counties located inAlabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, NorthCarolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. 1 According to the Commission's 1959 Report, in addition to the 51 with 3 percent or less Negro registration, 41 others had fewer than 10 percent oftheir adult Negro population on the rolls; only n had more than 30percent Negro registration and the remainder had between 10 and 30percent. 2

These statistics raise serious questions. Why does such a large,

identifiable segment of the population refrain from registering andvoting? What is the status of civil rights in a community where awhite minority makes (and enforces) the laws for a silent Negro majority?

To answer these questions (and pursuant to its jurisdiction to "studyand collect information concerning legal developments constituting

C99610201461 11 T . 0

1 4J

a denial of equal protection of the laws under the Constitution" 3 ) the

Commission has...