From the First World War to the present, a number of important changes have taken place in the status of the Afro-American people. Two of the most significant are the mass migrations of people from the Black Belt areas of the rural South; and accompanying this, an increased proletarianization of Black population into mainly urban workers, North and South.
Some argue these changes, along with certain minimal reforms won during the civil rights movement, have fundamentally changed the character of Black oppression. But nothing could be further from the truth. National oppression has actually intensified. The median income of the Black family as compared to white, has actually decreased. In the last few years alone, the gap between Black and white wages grew from Blacks making 61% of white wages in 1969 to 58% in 1973![1]
The flight of Black people from the rural Black Belt areas has never been voluntary but rather based upon deep misery, poverty, persecution. Millions, landless and facing starvation, were forced to leave their homes for the mills and factories in the big cities, North and South. Terror was an important weapon. Between 1900-14 there were 1097 recorded lynchings and by 1927 the number was 3,513. Periodic booms of industry in the North, particularly during war periods, drew large numbers in search of a livelihood-while periods of depression, such as the ’30s, actually saw slight reversals of this trend.
But today, despite mass migrations of enormous dimensions, there remains a stable community of Black people in the deep South. Even with the loss of 9 million acres of land over the last 40 years by Black landowners, 52% of all Black people still reside in the South. In fact, the actual number of Black people there has steadily increased. In 1940 there were over 9 million Black people in the South and by 1970 the number increased to nearly 12 million. Over 70% of all Black people in the U.S. were born in the South and if one could count those first-born generations in the North and West the figure would be almost 90%. Within the Black Belt itself, despite fierce economic and political coercion, there has remained since 1930 a stable community of over 5 million.
A brief look at the 1970 Census confirms that if one were to remove those artificially drawn southern state boundary lines (much less the gerrymandered county lines), a clear area of Black concentration still stands out in bold relief. There are 354 adjoining counties making up this Black Belt area, 111 of which are “50-80%” Black. In at least 4 Southern states (S. Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana), these make up the majority of the states’ territory.
By comparison, there are only 7 counties outside the South with a Black population of over 20%, and in the vast majority of the country, Black people comprise roughly 5% of the population.
It must be pointed out that while there has been a 65% decrease in the Black farm population between 1963-73, there has not been a corresponding increase in other categories (service, blue and white collar) of Black employment. Thus, the former farmers and sharecroppers have not at all been fully integrated into the U.S. working class but in fact have become a permanently unemployed reserve of labor in the big urban ghettoes with no regular means of subsistance other than welfare. This is proof positive that the plight of the Afro-American people cannot be reduced exclusively to a problem of super-exploited workers.
What can be said about conditions in the rural Black Belt area today? A brief look, even at government statistics, shows that this area still retains all the characteristics of national oppression.
The South, although containing 28% of the country’s population, receives only 9% of the nation’s income, despite rich natural resources. Almost half of all Black people living in the rural South make less than $3,000 a year. A Black family in South Carolina has a median yearly income which is $3,000 a year less than their counter-part in Illinois. The South leads the country in infant mortality and illiteracy. The South has become a haven for runaway shops from the North, who flee labor unions and seek super-profits off cheap labor. Now it is not at all uncommon to see large plants being constructed in the smallest Black Belt towns.
One can only conclude that the reason these depressed conditions still exist is because of the persistence of national oppression and the remnants of the plantation system existing even to this day. The South is the only region in the country where sharecropping still remains a sizeable part of agricultural production. Cotton production has largely become mechanized, but the Black sharecropper may now drive a tractor on the same plantation. A case in point is the growing Southern pulpwood industry, which encompasses an estimated 250,000 workers and their dependents. Much like the cotton sharecropper, the pulpwood cutters, which are 70-80% Black, still buy their equipment (saws, trucks, etc.) from the bossman on credit–keeping them in virtual and perpetual debt. The bossman today is the huge, imperialist paper companies such as International. Living in small, rural towns, conditions of life differ little from the old days of share-cropping.
Coupled with severe economic exploitation is the lynch-law political oppression of the population there. The well-oiled government machinery, perfected over the many years since Reconstruction, denies elementary democratic rights and union organization. It is no accident that the civil rights rebellions began in the South. Even today, ten years after the Voting Rights Act was passed, the Census Bureau points out many “irregularities” in Black voting patterns in the Southern states. According to their figures 53% of those Black voters registered listed as their reason for not voting that they were “unable to go to the polls,” a category which is much, much smaller in other sections of the country. In addition, they note that the largest nonvoting section of Black people still reside in the South.
Today, it is still the Rockefellers, Morgans, Eastlands and Mills B. Lanes who own and run the South. With the betrayal of Reconstruction in 1877, the elimination of national oppression and liberation of Black people, has become part of the U.S. socialist revolution—a question which only the working class, in closest alliance with the oppressed nationalities can solve.
[1] U.S. Bureau of the Census, "The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the U.S." (Subsequent statistics in this section are taken from U.S. government sources.