Greene County, The Black Belt's Deepest Story

Greene County, Alabama, is one of the poorest counties in the United States by nearly every economic measure, and it has been for most of its history. It is also one of the most politically significant, for reasons that begin in the soil.

The county sits in the Alabama Black Belt, a band of counties named for the dark, rich prairie soils that run across the center of the state. Before the Civil War, those soils made Greene County cotton country: large-scale plantations worked by enslaved people whose labor generated enormous wealth for a small planter class. By eighteen fifty, Greene County was one of the wealthiest counties in Alabama by per-capita income for its white residents, and one of the most brutally organized slave societies in the Deep South. Enslaved people outnumbered free white residents substantially.

After emancipation and Reconstruction, the wealth transferred in complex ways. The land stayed largely in planter hands. The freedpeople who had worked it became sharecroppers, tied to the same land under new legal arrangements that reproduced many of the economic conditions of slavery without the explicit ownership. By the early twentieth century, Greene County had become precisely the kind of impoverished, extractive rural economy that James Agee and Walker Evans documented elsewhere in the Alabama Black Belt when they traveled through Alabama in nineteen thirty-six for what became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

In nineteen sixty-nine, something unusual happened: Greene County elected Black officials to a majority of county government positions, becoming one of the first majority-Black counties in the Deep South to achieve Black political control after the Voting Rights Act of nineteen sixty-five. The county has been majority-Black governed since then.

Poverty and political empowerment have coexisted here ever since, which is itself a story about the limits of what politics alone can do in a county whose wealth was extracted and never returned.