The keynote of the Black Belt is debt; not commercial credit, but debt in the sense of continued inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income cover expense.
In his analysis of the post-Reconstruction South, Du Bois identifies chronic debt as the defining economic characteristic of the Black Belt.
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More from W.E.B. Du Bois
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness…
Years have passed away since then,—ten, twenty, forty; forty years of national life, forty years of renewal and development, and yet the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.
So the Cotton Kingdom still lives; the world still bows beneath her sceptre.