One of the first signs a person has reached Selma is Selma Hardware and Supply, located near the Depot, a museum that highlights Selma’s history.

The interior is painted white, and the store carries just about any trinket or item that anyone could need for home repair or home improvement, from screws and tools to gardening and construction supplies.

Its employees are fixtures, and they are fond of their city.

“I love Selma,” said David Lee, 53, who has worked at Selma Hardware and Supply for 33 years and seemingly knows everyone in the story. “I grew up here. It is home. I am not poor, so that helps. I am not wealthy mind you, but not poor.”

But they have stories of a city’s decline. Dallas County, where Selma is located, is shrinking like many other Black Belt counties. It lost a net of 5,000 people between 2010 and 2020.

That, said Lee, has led to a loss of good jobs. And with opportunities gone, so have the amenities and the cultural activities. There is little for youngsters to do. There are church and outdoor activities.

“They like to shoot down poor animals, but I don’t like to do that,” Lee said.

Faye Raney, a teacher who moved to Selma in 1985, also sees decline.

“Empty homes, empty buildings, empty businesses,” Raney said.

There are plenty of issues Raney and Lee bring up, but the one that keeps coming up is employment opportunities.

“The jobs here are all menial at best,” Lee said. “Like I said, there are a few higher end jobs, but they are usually taken by people whose families have had the jobs for 40, 50, 60 years. If you are not part of the group that is already entrenched in society here, your ability to move up is limited.”

The county’s unemployment rate is about 5%, roughly double that of the state. Most are working in about three different types of jobs, with about 27% working in business, management, or within the science or arts.

Manufacturing is one of the more prominent industries in the area, accounting for almost a quarter of all the businesses of the region. That is followed by the schools and medical care, with education, health care and social services making up for almost 20% of all businesses. That is followed by retail, which encompasses about 11% of the area’s businesses.

“You are not going to keep young, educated people here for those kinds of jobs,” Lee said. “You got International Paper, and you got Bush Hog, the hospital, but how many educated people do they employ?”

Diverging trends

Alabama as a whole grew slightly between 2010 and 2020. The U.S. Census estimates that about 5.074 million people call Alabama home.

Nearly all those gains went to Huntsville and suburban counties around the state.

Madison County, the home of Huntsville, saw its population increase by about 50,000 people between 2010 and 2020. Baldwin County, along the Gulf of Mexico, saw its population increase by almost the same amount.

Counties with major state universities in their backyard are also growing. Tuscaloosa County’s population jumped by 17%, going from slightly less than 195,000 people to almost 227,000 people. Lee County, with Auburn University, had a population of about 140,000 in 2010. It was nearly 175,000 by 2020.

It’s a much different story in Alabama’s rural counties, especially in the Black Belt.

“When we look at Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and most of the other Appalachian states, rural counties have been having population loss in general,” said Beth Jarosz, program director in the U.S. Programs for the Population Reference Bureau. “There are some that have bucked the trend, but in general, there has been population loss.”

Monroe County lost 3,000 people, and had the second highest population loss with more than 3,000.

Nine of the 10 Alabama counties with the biggest population losses in the 2010s were in the Black Belt. After Dallas County, the second biggest population loser was Monroe, which lost a net population of 3,000 people. The single exception is Calhoun County, whose population declined by 2%, going from about 118,000 residents back in 2010 to 116,000 in 2020.

Some counties saw even steeper percentage losses. Perry County’s population fell by 20%. Greene County, also in the Black Belt, started the decade with slightly more than 9,000 people. It was less than 8,000 by 2020, a roughly 11% drop.

The counties losing population tend to be poor and majority Black. More than 70% of residents living in Dallas County, which topped the list in terms of total population loss, are African American, roughly the same percentage as Perry County. Macon County, whose population declined by 1,900, has an African American population north of 80%. The Black population percentage living in Marengo County has a Black population that is just past 51%.

While Blacks do not comprise a majority of the population in most of the remaining counties with high levels of population loss, they remain significant. Monroe, Clarke, Barbour, and Butler counties are all counties in which the Black population is at least 40%.

In many cases, the declines are the latest chapter in a long story of population loss going back decades, touching on issues from the Great Migration to the automatization of farm work. Perry County’s population is just a third of what it was in 1940, as is nearby Greene County. Sumter County in west Alabama is half as big today as it was 80 years ago. Excluding Montgomery, the only two counties larger than they were in 1940 are Pike, the home of Troy University, and Russell, a suburb of Columbus, Georgia.

An aging population

Several factors contribute to changing population numbers.

“Populations change from a demographic perspective because of three processes,” said Nyesha Black, director of socioeconomic analysis & demographics at the University of Alabama. “We study fertility, mortality and migration. In simple terms, we study how people enter and exit the population. You do that through three processes, you are born into it, you die, or you move in or out of it.”

Many rural areas have long struggled with health issues.

“We have seen higher death rates even before the pandemic,” Jarosz said. “We were seeing death rates rising because of things like overdose and suicide, and then the pandemic, of course, added more than a million deaths on top of that.”

The population of the rural counties is also getting older.

“Birth rates have been dropping pretty dramatically, Jarosz said. “I know there was a little spike in 2021, but they have been falling really consistently since 2007.”

The median age for people living in the state is 39.4 years, slightly higher than the median age of the U.S. at 38.9 years.

That number is even higher in Black Belt counties that have seen the biggest population losses.

Residents of Wilcox County, which lost 9% of its population between 2010 and 2020, had a median age of 40.9 years, the third oldest in the state. In 2010, it was 37, an 11% increase. In Perry County, the median age increased from 35 years in 2010 to 39 years in 2020.

Of the 10 counties with the highest population percentage decline, six of them are also among the ten oldest counties in Alabama. Of those, only one, Coosa County, is not based in the Black Belt.

Cherokee County has the highest median age at about 47 years old.

“With an aging population, at some point we all age out of the population, and the more of us who end up in those older ages, the higher the number of people who are aging out, who are dying,” Jarosz said.

The death rate, tied to all those factors just mentioned, should have caused a decrease in the population for the state, but migration into places like Madison, Baldwin and Shelby counties also played a role.

“The reasons for that natural decrease often have a longer history, and that is in many rural counties, it is the young adult population who will leave,” said Kenneth Johnson, a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire. “Over a couple of decades, or a couple of generations, if a lot of the younger people leave and the older people stay in place, eventually the older people will age to a point where they will start to die off.”

But age and migration are taking their toll on Black Belt counties.

“You are having more deaths than births, and people are also leaving,” Black said. “More people are leaving that area than people who are moving in. Very simply you have an aging population, migration out of the area, fewer births relative to previous decennial years.”

Poverty accompanies places that lose population.

“Definitely in migration, there are selection effects,” Black said.

Migration is typically associated with groups of people with specific characteristics. Those who migrate are generally more economically advantaged. Those left behind will be on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale, which increases the poverty rate for an area.

“They are positively selected out of the population,” Black said. “Typically, they pledged to go get an education or they already have higher education, or a skill set that allows them to be mobile or take advantage of an opportunity somewhere else. And they have a higher level of interpersonal motivation to leave.”

Residents in these counties are less wealthy overall, with some recording poverty rates that are three times that of the country. The poverty rate in Perry County is almost 36%. In Dallas County, it’s 24.3% and in Barbour it’s 26.5%.

A lack of jobs and infrastructure

The Black Belt economy for decades was based on agriculture. As farms began to mechanize, the need for human labor declined, and with it the opportunities for younger people who needed work.

Johnson said evidence of population attrition stemming from natural reasons started appearing in the 1950s; became more common in the 1970s and 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s.

“What is not unusual in many rural counties, for half of the high school graduating class to be gone from the county within five years,” Johnson said. “Well, if that happens in the 1950s and 60s, then 25 years later when those children have grown up and have children themselves, there are only half as many of them to have children.”

That cycle then repeats for the next generation, the base becomes even smaller to produce the next generation.

Economic opportunity is a prominent issue for the counties experiencing population declines. Demographers refer to push factors that are squeezing younger people out of rural counties, along with pull factors that are enticing them to move to more urban and suburban areas.

Other factors include education, with high school graduates moving away to go to college. Others are drawn away because of the military, who will employ those with a high school diploma to work in different parts of the country, even internationally.

Michael Johnson, who grew up in Selma, was a standout athlete in high school, lettering in both football and basketball, while also graduating as valedictorian of the class at Dallas County High School in 2005.

“I always stayed busy in sports,” Johnson said. “In academics, I was on the math team and other little scholastic groups. I always stayed busy doing things like that.”

As a standout athlete, he received scholarships to several colleges and universities. He opted to sign with Georgia Institute of Technology, taking off for Atlanta for a free ride to play football.

“It was Atlanta, it was new, that is very attractive, very attractive coming from down here, seeing skyscrapers, seeing all the different people,” Johnson said. “You see it on TV. I remember being up there and people asking me, ‘hey, have you seen this person, have you seen that person? What stars have you seen?’ It was an allure. As a kid that was fun to be around. But, as you get older, you realize it is good to pop in now and then, but I don’t necessarily want to be around that day to day.”

It would be years before he would return permanently.

“We don’t have a big theater where they have multiple screens,” Johnson said. “You have to go to Prattville or Montgomery. You grow up being just used to, ‘I am going to just take this trip over there if it is something I desire doing.’ It is just not in your backyard.”

He remained in college for three years before deciding to leave to play professionally in the National Football League.

Johnson would end up getting drafted in the third round as the 70th overall pick by the Cincinnati Bengals, playing defensive end and outside linebacker for 10 years before signing with Tampa Bay. His career would end shortly after that.

Consequences

A community that begins to lose bodies loses a lot more.

Local municipalities, such as counties and cities, rely heavily on revenues that require people living in an area, or at very least, stopping by, like property and sales taxes, as well as charges for driver’s licenses and vehicle registration.

But all those revenue collection methods require people in the community. For property taxes, there must be an owner. For personal property, a resident.

“As the population declines, you have a lower tax base,” Jarosz said.

Decline also means that a community may find itself supporting more infrastructure than it needs.

“At the most basic level, things like roads and sewer systems,” Jarosz said. “If you have a road network that was built, or a transit system that was built, and designed to handle 100,000 people, and all of a sudden you have 50,000, it is a large amount of network. You need to fill potholes, or you need to fix broken pipes, and you don’t have as much money to do that with.”

Communities also need people for specific roles, from volunteer firefighters to volunteers for parent teacher associations to church members.

“A declining number of workers, particularly with necessities, things like health care and service types of workers,” Jarosz said.

Aside from that, Johnson mentioned people who volunteer at the fire departments, or who staff the parent teacher associations, churches and other community groups.

Health care becomes crucial in an aging community. But without a population base, it’s hard to attract medical providers.

“It becomes harder and harder to get medical care,” Johnson said. “Hospitals close, doctors’ offices close, and so you have to go further and further to get basic medical care, let alone specialized care.”

Schools are also impacted.

“The school systems will have to contract because there aren’t children anymore to staff all the schools,” Johnson said. “If you want to, at least in many parts of the country, if you want to upset people, all you have to do is talk about closing their school and consolidating it with a school in another county.”

Solutions

In theory, the solutions are simple. Population declines reverse course when births or net migration increases.

Some have tried to correct the problem by implementing incentives to increase birth rates. Some countries for example have decided to pay individuals to have children — with limited success.

“What we have seen is that it didn’t necessarily increase the fertility rate dramatically,” Black said.” The research that has come from that has shown it incentivized women or families that are already wanting to have children, to have their children earlier.”

Short of that, officials have turned their attention to migration, by trying to retain residents already living in the community or by enticing more to move. Economic development is key to the strategy.

“There is going to be a turn because we have some industrial projects that are underway right now, so there are jobs that are going to be coming back,” said Miles Robinson, a Macon County commissioner.

Commissioners are involved in talks with several companies to relocate to the area.

“One particular company is under construction right now,” Robinson said. “That is about 300 jobs. There is another one that is probably going to hire for 200 jobs. That is 500 jobs right there.”

Others believe the answer relates to quality of life matters, such as infrastructure. Selma is continuing to renovate its downtown, making renovations to buildings that need to be updated. City officials helped renovate the St. James Hotel in the downtown area. There is a restaurant located in the hotel for a place for people to dine to take advantage of the increase in tourism related to civil rights.

“I think there are a lot of things where the wheels are turning,” said Clay Carmichael, a member of the Selma City Council. “We just have to catch some gears and get them moving a little bit better.”

The focus on infrastructure needs to continue. Carmichael wants to recruit and hire someone who would search for grants and assist with securing additional funding so that the city can continue improving the infrastructure.

Sewer lines that are underground need to be replaced as well as roads that need to be repaved.

“They cave in often,” he said. “We have cave-ins around town.”

Johnson is opening an event space in downtown Selma later this year, hoping it will draw attention to the city. It will feature an open floor plan for clients who want to book the location for different types of events.

“Instead of complaining about it, I wanted to be part of the solution,” Johnson said.

Immigration could be an answer, but in a conservative state that attempted to criminalize the lives of undocumented immigrants in 2011, few policymakers want to discuss it.

“If the state of Alabama does not want immigrants, then they are also saying no to other things, whether they realize it or not,” Black said.

Jarosz and Black both said it may be better for some areas to accept that population loss will happen prepare for it. That could including planning infrastructure for a smaller community, or develop health care models allowing physicians to travel to patients’ homes.

“Every place goes through its economic cycles,” Black said. “And we are here to only witness a short part of it. I just think that is the reality of things. I think it is more about how you promote the best quality of life for the people who are there given the resources that we have.”

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Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.