The black map contains the counties of America and charts income inequality. Scattered dark black counties mark highest income inequality in the far west, but almost all of the lowest income counties are in the South. The red map also contains all the counties of America, and it also charts income inequality. But in this map, the charting is the income discrepancy within a county. Once again, southern counties show the greatest inequalities.
Southern counties have a few wealthy people and a great many poor ones.
Superimposed upon one another, what the combined maps tell us is that poverty is more prevalent in the South than in the rest of America, but that within the local county units of the poverty-laden South, the gap between the few very rich and the many very poor is more pronounced than in the rest of the nation. The maps are stark evidence that the South still has a long ways to go to catch up with the rest of the nation in average income and in equitable distributions of wealth. They reveal that the sunbelt prosperity that has seemed to have come to the South in the last few decades is ephemeral and mythical. The history of the South since its defeat in the Civil War has been a saga of searching for redemption . The South has spent 135 years trying to climb out of the poverty which its agricultural economy, dependence upon slavery, lack of industries, and wartime defeat imposed upon it.