Deep South

{{short] |1,246,176 |47 |1,348,462 |- | align="center" |4 |Birmingham |Alabama |196,910 |Birmingham-Hoover, AL MSA |1,116,857 |50 |1,362,731 |- | align="center" |5 |Greenville |South Carolina |72,310 |Greenville-Anderson, SC MSA |958,958 |60 |1,561,465 |- | align="center" |6 |Baton Rouge* |Louisiana |221,453 |Baton Rouge, LA MSA |873,060 |66 |1,010,108 |- | align="center" |7 |Columbia* |South Carolina |139,698 |Columbia, SC MSA |847,686 |72 |1,073,039 |- | align="center" |8 |Charleston |South Carolina |153,672 |Charleston-North Charleston, SC MSA |830,529 |74 |799,636 |- | align="center" |9 |Augusta |Georgia |202,096 |Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC MSA |624,083 |96 |615,933 |- | align="center" |10 |Jackson* |Mississippi |145,995 |Jackson-Yazoo City, MS MSA |583,197 |99 |688,270 |- | align="center" |11 |Chattanooga |Tennessee |181,099 |Chattanooga, TN-GA MSA |562,647 |101 |992,408 |- | align="center" |12 |Myrtle Beach |South Carolina |38,417 |Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach SC-NC MSA |536,165 |111 |447,823 |- | align="center" |13 |Huntsville |Alabama |221,933 |Huntsville, AL MSA |514,465 |113 |879,315 |- | align="center" |14 |Lafayette |Louisiana |121,389 |Lafayette, LA MSA |481,125 |118 |562,898 |- | align="center" |15 |Mobile |Alabama |183,289 |Mobile County, AL MSA |411,411 |128 |657,846 |- | align="center" |16 |Gulfport |Mississippi |72,236 |Gulfport-Biloxi-Pascagoula, MS MSA |420,782 |133 |442,432 |- | align="center" |17 |Savannah |Georgia |148,004 |Savannah, GA MSA |418,373 |134 |629,401 |- | align="center" |18 |Shreveport |Louisiana |180,153 |Shreveport-Bossier City, LA MSA |385,154 |140 |420,797 |} * Indicates state capital

Other substantial cities include:


State	Cities
Alabama	Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Auburn, and Dothan
Georgia	Columbus, Macon, Valdosta and Athens
Louisiana	Alexandria, Monroe, and Lake Charles
Mississippi	Meridian, Tupelo, and Hattiesburg
South Carolina	Sumter, and Florence

Climate

As part of the Sun Belt, the Deep South tends to have Temperate and Subtropical climates with long hot summers and short mild winters. The climate tends to display more pronounced Subtropical characteristics the closer you get to the coast. Due to its proximity to the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean, hurricanes are also a frequently-occurring natural disaster.

People

2000 Census Population Ancestry Map, with African-American ancestry in purple.

Most White people in the Deep South who identified themselves with one European ethnic group in the 1980 census self-identified as English. This occured in every southern state with the exception of Louisiana where more White people self-identified as French than English. ^[1]^[2] 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.^[3]

As of 2003^[update], the majority of Black Americans in the South live in the Black Belt geographic area.^[4]

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.^[5]

Politics

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."^[6]

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.^[7] 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.^[8]

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.^[9] The white Democratic-dominated state legislatures passed Jim Crow laws to impose white supremacy, including caste segregation of public facilities.^[10] 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.^[11]

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.^[12] Studies of the Civil Rights Movement often highlight the region.^{[citation needed]} 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."^[13]

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:

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.^[14]

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.^[6]

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.^[15]

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.^[16] 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.^[17] Since then, upwards of 90 percent of African Americans in the South have voted for the Democratic Party,^[18] including 93 percent for Obama in 2012, though this dropped to 88 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016.^[19]

Late 20th century to present

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.^[20] 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.

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.^[21]

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).^[22]

In the 2020 presidential election, 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. However, Georgia still maintains a Republican lean with a PVI rating of R+3 in line with its Deep South neighbors, with Republicans currently controlling every statewide office, its state Supreme Court, and its legislature.

States

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^[23]), South Carolina (until the 1920s^[24]), and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s^[25]). In the same period, Georgia,^[26] Alabama,^[27] and Florida^[28] had populations that were nearly 50% black, while Maryland,^[29] North Carolina,^[30] and Virginia^[31] had black populations approaching or exceeding 40%. Texas' black population reached 30%.^[32]

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.^[33] 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.^[34]

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.^[34]

Transportation

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 Shreveport, Jackson, Birmingham, Atlanta, Augusta, and Columbia.

References

^ 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.
^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 26, 2019. Retrieved October 26, 2015.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
^ Frank D. Bean; Gillian Stevens (2003). America's Newcomers and the Dynamics of Diversity. Russell Sage Foundation. p. 213. ISBN 978-1-61044-035-6. JSTOR 10.7758/9781610440356.
^ 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. Online^{[dead link]}
^ ^a ^b Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority: Updated Edition (2nd ed. 2917) p. 232.
^ Michael Perman, Pursuit of unity: a political history of the American South (U of North Carolina Press, 2010).
^ 6 J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Rise of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (Yale UP, 1974).
^ Michael Perman, Struggle for mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908 (U of North Carolina Press, 2003).
^ Gabriel J. Chin & Randy Wagner, "The Tyranny of the Minority: Jim Crow and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty,"43 Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 65 (2008)^{[permanent dead link]}
^ Valelly, Richard M. (October 2, 2009). The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Enfranchisement. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226845272 – via Google Books.
^ Earl Black and Merle Black, The rise of southern Republicans (Harvard University Press, 2009).
^ Seth C. McKee, The Past, Present, and Future of Southern Politics (2012) online. Google.com
^ See Matthew Yglesias, "Why did the South turn Republican?", The Atlantic August 24, 2007.
^ Phillips, p. 255
^ 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
^ Mark Stern, Calculating visions: Kennedy, Johnson, and civil rights (Rutgers UP, 1992).
^ Brad Lockerbie, "Race and religion: Voting behavior and political attitudes." Social Science Quarterly 94.4 (2013): 1145–1158.
^ Tami Luhby and Jennifer Agiesta, "Exit polls: Clinton fails to energize African-Americans, Latinos and the young" CNN Nov, 9, 2016
^ Thomas J. Sugrue, "It's Not Dixie's Fault", The Washington Post, July 17, 2015
^ "Demise of the Southern Democrat is Now Nearly Complete". The Sydney Morning Herald. December 12, 2007. Retrieved December 13, 2007.
^ Charles S. Bullock III and Mark J. Rozell, eds. The New Politics of the Old South: An Introduction to Southern Politics (2009) p 208.
^ "Table 33. Louisiana – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1810 to 1990" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-03-27.
^ "Race and Hispanic Origin for States" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on February 7, 2014. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
^ "Table 39. Mississippi – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1800 to 1990" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-03-27.
^ "Table 25. Georgia – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 23, 2013. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
^ "Table 15. Alabama – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1800 to 1990" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on October 23, 2013. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
^ "Table 24. Florida – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1830 to 1990" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-03-27.
^ "Race and Hispanic Origin for States" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on January 20, 2013. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
^ "Race and Hispanic Origin for States" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on January 20, 2013. Retrieved 2013-06-24.
^ "Table 61. Virginia – Race and Hispanic Origin: 1790 to 1990" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2010-03-27.
^ "African Americans". Handbook of Texas. Retrieved on December 17, 2011.
^ Maxine D. Rogers, et al., Documented History of the Incident Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida in January 1923, December 1993, p. 5 "Rosewood". Archived from the original on May 15, 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-01., March 28, 2008
^ ^a ^b William H. Frey, "The New Great Migration: Black Americans' Return to the South, 1965–2000", The Brookings Institution, May 2004, pp. 1–5 "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on April 28, 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-19.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link), accessed March 19, 2008