Short answers, pulled from the story.
The core states of the Deep South are Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. East Texas, North Florida, the Arkansas Delta, South Arkansas, West Tennessee, and the southern part of North Carolina are sometimes included as well.
Before 1945, the Deep South was commonly called the Cotton States because cotton was the primary cash crop for economic production in the region. Rice was also important in Georgia and South Carolina, and sugar in Louisiana.
The Black Belt is a geological formation of naturally rich, dark soil that runs through the inner core of the Deep South and historically supported cotton plantations. Booker T. Washington explained in his 1901 autobiography that the term originated from the soil's color, then shifted after the Civil War to describe counties where Black people outnumbered white residents.
The shift began in the 1964 presidential election, when a significant contingent of white conservative voters in the Deep South stopped supporting national Democratic candidates and began voting Republican, accelerating with George Wallace's 1968 campaign. By 2014, Republicans swept every statewide office in the Deep South midterm elections and came to control all state legislatures in the region.
The Deep South was the central arena of the Civil Rights Movement after 1950. Key events included the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, the 1960 founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the 1964 Freedom Summer. These efforts contributed to Lyndon B. Johnson securing Congressional approval for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
African Americans left the Deep South in two waves between 1916 and 1970, totaling more than six million people, to escape racial oppression, violence, and the economic hardship of the segregated South. They sought better employment opportunities and living conditions in Northern and Midwestern industrial cities and later in California. One-fifth of Florida's Black population had left the state by 1940.