AL.com on Alabama’s Black Belt

By Hunter Wallace

A friend called this morning to draw my attention to two articles on Al.com about the sorry state of Alabama’s Black Belt:

“LIVINGSTON, Ala. – Band Director Ryan Campbell watched his Sumter Central High School Tigers marching band strut last week on a field outside the gleaming new public high school in Sumter County.

“Where are the white kids?” a visitor asked.

“At the academy down the road,” Campbell said, referring to private Sumter Academy.

“What’s the future here for these kids?” the visitor asked.

“There’s nothing to do here,” Campbell said. “The best we can do is educate them the best we can.”

“Nothing here.” It’s the image Alabama’s historic Black Belt has fought for decades, often with little help from Montgomery. And new decisions by state leaders have people here wondering if, this time, Alabama is writing off the Black Belt for good. …”

Both articles blame Montgomery for the mess Washington has created here.

1.) The first blow to the Black Belt was the abolition of slavery. The region emerged from the War Between the States relatively unscathed, but Washington never had any plan to restructure the economy beyond the heartfelt superstition that “free labor” is superior to slave labor. Abolition predictably led to economic collapse like it had in the Caribbean.

2.) The second blow was the Republican Party’s domination of the federal government until the 1930s. Whether it was high tariffs, Union Army pensions, lack of credit, or internal improvements, the federal government’s economic policies systematically favored the Northern manufacturing belt over the agrarian ex-Confederate South.

3.) The third blow, which was the most damaging, was successfully imposing the Civil Rights Movement on the South. In the Alabama Black Belt, this led directly to black majority rule and integrated public schools with tiny White minorities all over the region. Washington got its way and the result was a White exodus.

4.) The fourth blow has been globalization since the 1990s. Trade policy is set in Washington and textile jobs and light manufacturing – like the steel industry in Birmingham – have fled the region for China, Mexico, and other Third World destinations. Aquaculture has been driven out of business in many places due to foreign comeptition.

Along the way, the boll weevil and the mechinization of agriculture helped to expedite depopulation. The current state of the region is largely due to Washington’s domination though. Nothing of much importance in settled here at the state or local level.

We’re living out the progressive utopia whether it is free labor, free trade, or civil rights and integration. It doesn’t work here, but then again it doesn’t work anywhere else either.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

45 Comments

  1. I’m glad Russia is obliterating ISIS (Israeli Secret Intelligence Service) mercs. They’ve shown how degraded we’ve become.

    The rest of the world SEES.

    The Black Plague of modern ‘Murka is far more deadly than the one that raged through Europe, centuries ago…..

  2. There’s a black YouTuber who calls himself Painless Risen, who is from the county south of Selma and Dallas County, the county is Wilcox, and the largest town in it is Canton. From what he has said on his videos about Wilcox County, which is part of the black belt, it is to blacks what Appalachia is for whites, a place where anyone with any kind of “get up and go” is going to do just that, get up and go. The people who stay behind are an accidental long term experiment in dysgenics.

  3. It’s a non-issue.

    Anyone who wants to vote can still easily get a photo id at the county courthouse. The real reason those driver’s licenses offices were closed is because no one lives in those counties anymore. More people now live in Baldwin County than in all the small Black Belt counties.

  4. BTW, you would never know from reading the article that life in a rural area – say, like in Alaska or Wyoming – is like that everywhere and has nothing to do with “racism.”

  5. When I saw the photo the first thing that I thought of was the old Johnny Rebel song “Lookin’ for a Handout.” The line about the shack and the Cadillac and the 15 negroes inside having one can of beans for dinner.

  6. “In the Alabama Black Belt, this led directly to black majority rule and integrated public schools with tiny White minorities all over the region. Washington got its way and the result was a White exodus.”

    Wow. That made me picture America after Obama’s race computer tracks every white and chases them with diversity. Whites with no where left to run will flee the US and the entire country will become an Alabama Black Belt.

  7. ““Where are the white kids?” a visitor asked.” – there simply aren’t 9 white children for every 1 black child in this country anymore. you’d think they’d pick up on what they have been triumphantly touting this whole time.

  8. Obama says that the future workforce of this country will be black and brown. I wonder how that will turn out…

  9. HW

    It’s like I said, it’s the black women DMV clerks trying to save their jobs, and if the fly by night month at a time insurance companies operate near DMV offices, they’re probably trying to save a little bit of their busines.

  10. From the Wilcox County article

    Spruell has a 14-year-old daughter, who will soon qualify for a driver’s license, which means the family will have to take a 45 minute trip to Selma or Linden.

    “It’s definitely inconvenient,” Spruell said. “It is just a matter of paying someone to take us (to Linden or Selma), but that can be really difficult.”

    Now new drivers will have to adjust to unfamiliar environments to pass the driving test, said Marvin Carter, transportation director for Wilcox County Schools who taught driver’s education at Wilcox Central High School for seven years.

    There are just five traffic lights in Wilcox County. Just a one-mile stretch of road in the entire county is four lanes.

    “I’d say there’s a 70 percent chance these students will fail a driving test unless they practice before they go,” Carter said. “Another thing is, since the office closed here, they’ll have to miss one or two school days a year just to go take their driving tests. Driving to Selma or Linden is an all day thing.”

    Well duh, if you drive, you’re liable to drive in conditions other than the ones you’re used to on a day to day basis. Otherwise, licenses issued in Wilcox County would only be good in Wilcox County.

    This county is so rural that the intimation here is that by comparison, Selma, which is the village of the damned, abandon hope all ye who enter here, fools rush in where angels dare not tread, is a giant city by comparison.

  11. Countenance. Thanks! FYI – I live in a rural White area, and the DVM office ’round here is open one day a week. You take a number, get in line, and WAIT. No one complains. We may grumble….but we just get on with it.

  12. “The towns that are doing well are towns like Livingston and Marion, the places that have colleges or schools,” Burnes said. “They’re big employers. They kind of cycle people through. They have these students, but they don’t need a lot of infrastructure outside the school. It’s a pretty good industry if you can think of it that way.”

    In Livingston’s case, it’s along I-20/59, so that’s going to help it a little bit.

    When Burnes wrote her doctoral thesis on the Civil Rights Movement, she found that, “White and black people would have two completely different versions of the same exact situation, consistently. So, I thought we’re never going to get anywhere. But now, the younger generation and some older people are willing to realize this is 2015 and not 1965, as far as race relations, and are trying to move forward.”

    Oh no don’t say that. It’s always 1964, the blue political party is in Forever 1964 mode, just like the red political party is in Forever 1980 mode.

  13. Ka-Bam! Hunter knocks it out of the park. The fact is and I didn’t understand this until recently GOD ALMIGHTY established the MASTER and the SERVANT relationship for mankind in the garden. This was emulated by Man’s governments after the fall. THERE ARE MASTERS and THERE ARE SERVANTS/SLAVES. This was the natural order that GOD established.

    God also provided us a way out of the oppressive Master-Slave-Servant world with Jesus Christ in whom we learn to love our servitude because we live for him so that he will lift us up on the last day.

    This natural order that GOD Himself proscribed man tried to innovate with it, gain self government. We got Democracy, Republics all promising Freedom which eventually devolves into chaos. Freedom is ANTI-GOD because God proscribed Servitude for the majority of Mankind and Rulers for a tiny bit. Thats how it is.

  14. Oliver Cromwell in the 1640’s promised freedom for the people of England and what happened? Chaos and eventually the people of England cried out for the King. In 1688 William and Mary agreed to give the people limited freedom. By 1775 the ideas of philosophers had taken the place of GOD AND HIS SON JESUS CHRIST and this idea of Human Freedom took place. The idea then expanded and then became human freedom was universal in fact many of the American Colonies and Thomas Jefferson himself, drunk on the idea of Universal Freedom proposed partial full emancipation of slaves. Of course they came to their senses.

  15. Abraham Lincoln and what happened in 1861 was merely the outgrowth of 200 years of pushing the LIE of HUMAN FREEDOM. The people were drunk on the lie, indoctrinated on the lie and when freedom came to Negroes, suddenly realized it too late. The Negro ended up going from a relationship of care under a master to benign neglect where children died of malnutrition Yet this was freedom.

    Fast forward to 2015. What does Freedom really mean? Freedom to some people means freedom to engage in perversion, freedom to burn toxic waste, freedom to build a roller coaster in a suburban neighborhood, freedom to worship Satan. IS THIS FREEDOM? NO THIS IS CHAOS.

  16. The Confederate leaders sometimes wrongly claimed they were fighting for freedom because even some of them had absorbed the Freedom Dogma for 100 years. The truth was the Confederacy was fighting for the natural order, GODS ORDER. The Aristocrat had Freedom, the Merchant Class rank two, the independent farmer rank three, the white peasant class rank four and the Slave almost none. Few truly espoused or explained this idea of freedom as it would have alienated the Poor Whites who had been told since Jackson they had a GOD GIVEN RIGHT TO VOTE and believed it. Only South Carolina in 1860 still didnt have a Presidential Popular vote and rightly so.

  17. What we see since the Lincoln victory is the truth of Freedom is a lie. The Aristocracy was reduced or in some cased destroyed, replaced with a coalition of poor fair to middlin and merchant whites, which forced their will sometimes for good, other times not as good. The Negro became the victim of benign neglect driving him into dysfunction. Some rose to the challenge, most did not. Northern Industrialists didnt want the South to enjoy its fruits so they kept it poor and as a supplier. This continued till the 1970s when the Clean Air Act ended the Northern pollutionfest and sent jobs south

  18. Since 1970 a version of Yankee civilization was foisted on Dixie, the so called New South complete with souless strip malls and generic vanilla everything. Sure there were more jobs, sure people could buy televisions and shoes for the children, but at what cost. Was there freedom? With more things came more cost, came more debt came a loss of culture and a knowledge of survival. Is this freedom? Nope

  19. Now Yankee Deindustrialization and Brownfields come to Dixie, the land in some places is destroyed, and what for? Freedom? Dont make me laugh.

  20. I’ve taken only a glance at the articles you linked, Mr. W., but what’s the problem here? You have a region that, for climatic reasons or whatever, was not suited for white laboring. Is that incorrect? Seriously: I’m asking. That’s my sense, from my very-limited knowledge of the history. Because whites saw some agricultural potential in the soil there, or whatever, they enslaved blacks to work in the area. Again–is there something I’m missing? I know very little of this history. At some point, some humane persons, who objected to the enslavement, destroyed it. Consequently, there was no more economic activity there, which is pretty-much what whites thought would be there without slaves. What’s the big deal? Obviously, there’s the problem of the slaves’ descendants, who’ve been languishing there for a century-and-a-half, I guess. Yes, if the humane persons who destroyed the slavery hadn’t had their heads up their asses, they’d have acted to sterilize the slaves, to bring an end to the misery. They didn’t do that, because, as I just said, they had their heads up their asses, as did the whites who did the enslaving.

  21. JohnB – the Yankee Abolitionist Do Gooders “Freed Da Slabes”. THEY created the problem.

    How are the Free Negroes in Philadelphia doing? They are much more active, right?

  22. Huh? What are you asking me, Denise? No, the free Negroes in Philadelphia probably aren’t much more active than the ones in the Black Belt. I think we all know that the populations of slave descendants are languishing in great numbers in locales all over the U.S. at this point. The present post is about Alabama’s black belt.

  23. Freedom sounds good. Its like ice cream and fizzy drinks. But what is freedom to you? Its probably the ability to work and receive the fruits of your labor, and having a say over the education and governance of your children and land. This is great. However, what is freedom to the negro? A creature from the Stone Age whose ancestors fled from Lions and Hyenas and ate the fruit and berries and carcasses left by the predators knows nothing of work. The pinnacle of negro achievement is a hut made of mud and feces. In a huge continent of rich soil and abundant wildlife, the negro planted not a single seed or domesticated a single animal. Having no wheel or the ability to make fire, they ran naked into the White man. White women have an insane false love and imprudent altruism for wild useless creatures. This is probably why this feral untamed savage that should be a fossil in a museum is still alive to rape her and kill her children.

  24. Whatever freedom might be to the Negro, Dr. Doom, he was entitled to it–but not among whites.

  25. the issue with sanders as i see it, is that his ‘class struggle’ is really populism. He ignores the role of the US as an enforcer of imperialism and instead focuses on the middle class of America.

    That said, he’s not a radical war monger.

    To Bernie the issue is the shrinking middle class in America, but even the middle class in America exploits others. A lot of people who fought in the Iraq war were middle class.

  26. Can there be some successful agriculture using Black labor?

    South Africa did have productive agricultural economies without using slavery. Can someone grow wine grapes or something?

    Hippies doing organic agribusiness – the soil is good isn’t it?

  27. Yankees had convinced themselves that “all men are created equal” and “free labor is superior to slave labor.” They ignored the Caribbean precedent and when abolition was applied here it destroyed the economy.

  28. “Whatever freedom might be to the Negro, Dr. Doom, he was entitled to it”

    No, John. As Billy Ray Jenkins’ incipient Royalism noted, and as Doug Wilson wrote about, Slavery is an INESCAPABLE CONSTRUCT. Just like the poor, ‘the slave ye will have with you always.’

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y0fTaMBESs

    Freedom, as a philosophical construct can never be predicated of those who are slaves. The two are DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED. This is so obvious, as to be utterly not even worth mentioning… but it needs to be. Ancient Greece, ‘the cradle of democracy’ only sought to give ‘rights’ to the local- NEVER the ‘Xenos.’ We all know that. We all instinctively understand that. But it’s the working out of that, that scares us. After the Obamanation, Ferguson, Trayvon, Eric ‘my people’ Holder, I think we can dispense with the niceties, and get our hands dirty, for the first time in, oh, about 150 years.

    The ancient world had a few forms of physical manumission. I am sure, as a mature man, you know this. What most don’t understand/grasp (especially Evanjellygoos) is that Christianity came, to free ONLY THE PEOPLE OF GOD (‘his own’ as Matt. 1:21 makes clear) from THEIR slavery… to sin. Which is (I trust you follow) the PRIMARY point at which to start.

    So, UNLESS a White Christendom man is first ‘freed from sin’ he remains a slave for eternity. Those NOT of the ‘Elect Race, holy Seed, royal priesthood’ (do i really need to furnish chapter/verse?) WILL NEVER BE FREE, as they are PREDESTINED to remain slaves, their entire lives. They can choose to be immoral or moral, and their punishment/culpability may be lessened, and some (the ‘good darkies’) may actually enter into the Kingdom/Church, but only as the ‘doorkeepers/slaves that clearly remain, EVEN IN THE WAKE OF THE GOSPEL. The book of Philemon is a case in point. The Elect status of the ‘twelve tribes, scattered abroad’ still remains, in the NT, and in the Church. God has a SEED/SON, and ‘the slave will never inherit with the free born.’ ( Galatians)

    The Negro, both as a ‘lesser race without the law’ and as an operational PAGAN, can NEVER BE FREE. Therefore, freedom is denied to him- and the heresy of the modern Multicultural Egalitarian kingdom of Satania, is the only place where such blasphemy can even take hold. Which is why it must be changed, or it will be torn down. God is not mocked, and neither is the history of Christendom… or the ‘noble dead’ of the South. Which is why I am now an ‘unreconstructed Yankee’ and have been, ever since I came to understand that Christianity- REAL, TRUE Christianity, can NEVER make equal that which ‘God hath set asunder.’

  29. South Africans fed the bears, the bears population exploded then South Africans didn’t have a country any more. The Yankees made the same mistake and it will be the end of them too.

    Don’t Feed the Bears

  30. Once again Hunter Wallace knocks it out of the ballpark! A few points I might add. Freedom is useless without sovereignty. A people are not free if they are not sovereign and they are not sovereign if they have lost control of their destiny,their future,to an entrenched hostile elite. Such is now the case with white Americans (And with African-Americans, Native-Americans, and Latinos. They to are not free because they are not in control of their destiny)In that regard Karl Marx certainly had it wrong. It is not religion that is the opiate of the people, its voting! Think not because you vote you are therefore free! I really know of only one people that are truly sovereign because they are in control of their destiny through manipulation of Western institutions.
    On an unrelated note nobody ever mentions the biological reason for slavery. In those days malaria killed tens of thousands of whites which made them unproductive in a hot sub-tropical climate which is prime mosquito breeding area, especially since crops are dependent on water and misquotes breed in stagnant water. Negros, however, have a resistance to malaria that whites do not.

  31. Fr. John–you didn’t quote my whole sentence, which ended with “but not among whites.” Blacks and whites should not be living among each other at all, as I’ve said here, at Occidental Dissent, many times. Blacks should have been left to their own world. If any of them were enslaving each other, well, then that was not something for whites to touch. Once they were dragged out of their own world, into the white world, there was a problem that could be solved only by sterilization, as I said above.

  32. “Yankees had convinced themselves that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘free labor is superior to slave labor.'”

    I don’t know whether free labor is superior to slave labor, Mr. W., but are you suggesting the South would be a better place if all of your Southern relatives, friends, and acquaintances, who are working on farms and in factories, stores, libraries, gas stations, gymnasiums, entertainment venues, etc. were enslaved?

  33. “Once they were dragged out of their own world, into the white world, there was a problem that could be solved only by sterilization, as I said above.”

    Or repatriation. Which is far more civil, and would (if we removed all white/Western aid) allow Africa to ‘realize her full potential.’ I am not opposed to Eugenics, for the unfit. I am opposed to abortion. There is a HUGE difference between the two, even though some wil say there isn’t. One is merely not allowing someone to breed indiscriminately. The other is murder.

  34. I’m still waiting for an answer, Mr. W. Maybe you’re out doing chores or something. Is this what you’re saying: Economic activity in the South would be better if the workers there were enslaved? I’ve probably seen a photograph or two of Vanderbilt University. That’s in the South, isn’t it? Are you saying the campus would look nicer if the persons who do the landscaping and maintain the buildings were slaves? That seems to be what you’re saying: Slavery was great, the economy of the South needs it. Really? It doesn’t look that way. Maybe I’m missing something.

  35. Any opportunities for young whites in that neck of the woods? I really could care less about the fate of blacks as a whole, if they are decent people then good for them if they do well, the rest can rot. But those old habits of worrying about blacks still haunts us, kept an eye on sure worried about NO.

  36. Hunter I will always believe that the average White man in Northern blue had little understanding of what he was fighting for. The South had 2 societies, the highly educated elites and everyone else. The North had only really one highly educated state, Massachusetts and the rest of the people were basically mediocre products of public education.

  37. If you look closely at 1861 and read some of the writings of that time, many Southern writers noted that the North had an overabundance of mediocre men who thought and acted as mediocrity allows. The idea of Leveling that had come out of New England was basically about spreading enough education around but not too much, in other words creating a bunch of mediocre men.

    Mediocre men do not think, they obey orders. When the war came, 90% cared nothing about Negroes, all they believed in was the Preservation of George Washington’s Nation and it was 1776 all over again. Hyperactive Patriotism cleverly pushed through the newspapers and schools. The others looked mostly toward economic gain, such as Homesteads, which for whatever reason the Democrats had up to then opposed.

    About 1875, when most of the Abolitionist Politicians were either dead or retired, you saw this mediocre generation take over who promptly declared the Negro, not our concern and pretty much greenlighted Jim Crow. Of course their mediocrity brought in such unprecedented corruption and soon they had sold themselves into Jewish bankster slavery. By 1933, these mediocre men were replaced by Trucklers and Jewish Technocrats.

    That brings you to 2015

  38. Free labor is superior to slave labor, for a number of reasons. For example, you can’t trust slaves with your best farm equipment – they’ll be sure to break it.

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