Southern Towns Shrink, Economic Woes Grow

from NBC 11 Atlanta

GAINESVILLE, Ala. (USAToday.com) -- This speck-on-the-map town, once Alabama's third largest, is home to fewer than 400 hardy souls. It has four tiny churches: Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian.

Through the years, so many people have left that members of different churches worship together so they can keep the congregations going. They call themselves "Methobapteriapalians." Says Maxine McClusky, a member of Gainesville Baptist and St. Albans Episcopal churches: "Sometimes on Sunday morning, it's just one or two of us and the preacher."

This is life in a vanishing place: Sumter County, Ala., one of the nation's fastest-shrinking counties. Since 2000, the population of the county, in west-central Alabama along the Mississippi border, has declined 10.1%, according to the Census Bureau. The drop follows decades of similar losses, a disheartening trend that is altering the way people live.

The USA's population history is most often a story of growth ? of people moving to ever-growing metropolises and the challenges of accommodating them. The nation, which has one of the highest growth rates among industrialized countries, passed the 300 million mark in population almost two years ago and is expected to reach 400 million by 2040. But vast sections of the nation are seeing heavy, sustained population losses, a reflection of the decline of family farming and the lack of rural jobs and economic opportunities.

Some of the most drastic population decreases in the 20th century occurred in a wide swath of rural counties in the Great Plains, from the Canadian border to Texas.

Here in the Southeast, demographics have been dominated by dynamic growth: the New South economic engines of Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, N.C., and Nashville; the steady hustle of tourist magnets such as Charleston, S.C., and Jacksonville; and business expansion even in some smaller cities such as Smyrna, Tenn., Canton, Miss., and Lincoln, Ala., where automobile manufacturing plants have brought thousands of jobs ? and new residents.

But there's another story here ? about places that have seen their populations fall decade after decade. Sumter and most of the Southeast's other shrinking counties are in the so-called Black Belt, where vestiges of the Old South ? de facto school segregation, poor race relations and entrenched poverty ? are most prevalent. Rural towns in the Carolinas and Georgia, and especially in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, are hollowing out.

"It is the poorest region in the country, poorer than the Appalachian region and poorer than the Mississippi Delta region," says Joseph Whorton, a senior fellow at University of Georgia's Fanning Institute.

The Black Belt, which stretches from Virginia to East Texas, is named for the rich, dark topsoil that drew plantation owners to the region. Today the term also refers to the region's large African-American population, many descended from slaves brought to work on Black Belt plantations. Commonly defined as 623 mostly contiguous counties across 11 states, the Black Belt is home to about 40% of the nation's 40 million blacks.

Those who live here often tolerate driving an hour each way to shop for groceries or dresses, and that far or farther to work. They accept the empty storefronts on the main streets of every little town, and they try to ignore stigmatizing news reports about their region. They endure slow dial-up Internet connections, long stretches of lonely roads rolling past fallow farms and the absence of siblings who left to find jobs. They bear it all because, for them, the ability to live in a region they love outweighs the inconveniences and hardships of life in a vanishing place.

"This is a great place to live, and a lot of people would like to stay here but they can't because there aren't any jobs," says Lovell Burrell, 47, a disabled heavy equipment operator. "All my brothers and sisters, everybody I went to school with, has left here to find work."

That might be about to change. Some Black Belt experts and residents see signs of change and say the long-neglected region is poised for improvement.

A litany of challenges

Socioeconomic ills are rampant in much of the Black Belt: Soaring unemployment. High births by unwed mothers. Bad schools. Crime. High dropout rates.

Those who study the region say its problems stem from a history of racial inequity and a post-World War II economic development strategy of recruiting low-paying industry jobs from the North. The problems are magnified by its rural nature, a lack of employment and other economic opportunities, and by dual school systems of private academies for whites and underperforming public schools for blacks. "The cost of poverty, the cost of impoverishment, these have accumulated over generations," says Ron Wimberley, a sociology professor at North Carolina State University who has studied the region for 18 years.

The recent declines of rural areas have been less drastic in the Carolinas and Georgia. "The employment conditions and other economic conditions and well-being are higher in the Atlantic coastal states' Black Belt region than in the Gulf coastal states' Black Belt region," Wimberley says.

The population loss occurring here and in the Great Plains stems from two sources, says Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire. First, out-migration: People, particularly the young, leave for better economic opportunities. Second, the population eventually drops through natural decrease as more people die than are born.

"Each generation is smaller than the generation before," Johnson says. "The median age of people in many of these counties is the late 40s or early 50s, which is actually old for an American county." The national median age in 2006 was 36.4, according to the Census.

The repercussions of these changes are significant, Johnson says. Hospitals close their obstetrics units and focus more on cardiac care and orthopedics. Schools encounter difficulty getting funding because there are so few school-age children. Volunteer fire departments and paramedic units can't fill job openings. Potential employers wonder whether there are enough young people to staff factories.

In the Black Belt, African-Americans in large numbers began migrating north to relatively lucrative factory jobs at the beginning of the 20th century, says professor Joe Sumners, director of the Economic and Community Development Institute at Auburn University. The small-farm economy of the region was dying out, replaced by large-scale and corporate farms. The businesses that had supported small farming ? cotton gins, grain distributors, equipment sales ? dried up.

"A lot of that was mitigated by low-skill, low-wage manufacturing jobs, especially in textiles and apparel," he says. "Well, as we got into more of a global economy, where low-wage, low-skill textile companies could find cheaper labor costs overseas and in Central and South America, those companies began to leave in the latter part of the 20th century, and that continues today."

Farming is still prevalent in parts of the region, but it's often corporate operations.

"If you drive through the Black Belt, you'll find a lot of them that are fallow," says Terance Winemiller, associate professor of anthropology and geography at Auburn University of Montgomery and a lecturer on the Black Belt.

Hope for a turnaround

Winemiller and other Black Belt scholars such as Wimberley and Sumners say they are more optimistic than ever about prospects for improvement.

Land-grant universities in Black Belt states are seeking solutions, tourism is being promoted in some areas and congressional representatives and others are pushing for a federal Regional Black Belt Commission, similar to the Appalachian Regional Commission. Congress created the agency in the mid-1960s to battle widespread poverty and growing economic hardship in the region.

"There's a growing understanding that it takes more than civil rights laws to make the needed changes," Wimberley says. "It takes participation and a regional involvement. In fact, I would say even a national involvement. People are talking about it now. In every (Southern) state, people know what the Black Belt is, whereas before, they thought you were talking about martial arts."

U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, a Democrat who represents most of Alabama's Black Belt counties, says the quality of local political leadership in the region is improving.

"It's better than it's ever been," he says. "But the abysmal poverty in the rural South is going to require the leadership of the presidency ? to give this a sense of public priority."

Sumners and others are pinning hopes on a new economic development deal. Gov. Bob Riley and U.S. Steel Corp. announced in April that the company will build a steel plant here that eventually will create 235 jobs and bring a $450 million total economic impact.

The plant also will create secondary jobs and generate other openings as people move to jobs there, says professor Ken Tucker, dean of the business school at University of West Alabama. It "has the potential to transform this area," he says.

Race still a touchy issue Racial distrust is as prevalent in the Black Belt as the fertile topsoil ? and much deeper. Blacks are the overwhelming majority here, but they did not gain political power until the 1980s. In many places, they have proved as ineffective in addressing the region's ills as their white predecessors.

"It's not any one thing," says Sumners, who has studied the Alabama Black Belt for 10 years. "A lot of it is probably the legacy of slavery. The decline in the agriculture economy. The lack of jobs. It's sort of a cycle of problems. Once people leave, you lose the tax base."

Gainesville, like much of Sumter County and the surrounding region, has a certain frozen-in-time feel. The whole town ? all 67 buildings ? is on the National Register of Historic Places. In the 1840s, the place had two hotels, three newspapers and 4,000 residents, says professor Tina Jones, director of the Center for the Study of the Black Belt at the University of West Alabama in Livingston, the Sumter County seat.

Today, life here unfolds more leisurely. People talk slowly, their conversation punctuated by thoughtful pauses. They wave at strangers.

It's a pace of life that Margaret McGough missed. She moved to Lafayette, La., after college until the tug of home pulled her back here 20 years ago.

She and Maxine McClusky, both in their mid-50s, are white and have known each other since growing up here in the 1970s. They made time to talk one recent afternoon in McGough's gazebo as they prepared for the wedding of McGough's niece to McClusky's son. The groom, Jonathan McClusky, works in a paper mill 45 minutes away. His wife, Chandler, just graduated from Auburn University and is job hunting. They hope to remain in Gainesville.

Edmond Bell, 54, who is black, a Baptist pastor and the newly appointed Sumter County circuit court clerk, says he's optimistic because African-Americans and whites here began talking to each other last March through a weekly prayer breakfast. "We've established some dialogue," he says. "But in establishing dialogue, you have to be honest. What our parents didn't deal with, we have to deal with."

Bell says blacks and whites often have a difficult time talking honestly about issues in the Black Belt. They have a hard time getting past pointing fingers. But he says there is a growing consensus that the schools have to be fixed for Sumter County to prosper.