This is an opinion column.

Alabama’s Black Belt may soon be a black hole. Right through the heart of our state.

People are leaving the long-neglected region faster than anywhere else in Alabama. So says the U.S. Census. Nine of the state’s 10 fastest-shriveling counties since 2010 lie in the Black Belt. Since then, 24,300 people have moved elsewhere — leaving behind those whose souls are tied to the area’s dark, rich soil for which the region was originally named and those who simply can’t afford to move.

Felecia Lucky is among the former. She was born in Livingston, where more than half of residents live below the poverty line — double the state’s rate. As president of the Black Belt Community Foundation, she travels the state in search of allies and resources to support the 12 troubled counties BBCF serves.

She could leave. Maybe should leave for all the miles she piles onto her odometer. But she’s won’t. “People I went to high-school with ask all the time, ‘Why are you still there? I can’t imagine having to drive 30 minutes to a mall.’ I love it here.”

The exodus represents 4.3 percent of the Black Belt’s population. Even accounting for fast-growing Russell County (up 9 percent since 2010).

“I know people are leaving,” Lucky says. “They’re searching for a better school system for their children. Or a job to better provide for their families as we continue to struggle with unemployment. Young families looking to grow move because of the shortage of housing in some areas.”

The Black Belt is lacking in too many ways to accept. Because no one is looking. No one is listening. And haven’t for decades. Lucky traces the decline back to the end of segregation and the creation of dual, yet inherently unequal systems in education, health care, almost everywhere — dual systems yet to be dismantled.

Systems that created a region “where your ZIP code determines your quality of life,” Lucky says.

Systems, she adds, that “are still hurting and killing us.”

Lucky is just slightly skeptical of the census data, recalling her own travails with it in 2010. She doesn’t remember filling it out, honestly. Mail, in rural Livingston, was not delivered to her home but to a P.O. box. She worked in Selma, 77 miles away, making the trip every day. “Even if I worked in Livingston,” she recalls, “when census workers knocked on my door, I probably would not have been home. So, I was probably left out. People were likely grossly undercounted in many communities for similar reasons.”

Lucky and the foundation are trying to ensure Black Belt residents are not left out of the 2020 count. Working since March, she says, they’ve reached 960 families. Some live in the region’s poorest neighborhoods, in counties like Wilcox and Perry, and cities like Livingston. Places where online access to the census form, for the first time, is a waste — because there is too-often no broadband.

“A lot of people don’t know they can [fill out the census] on their cell,” Lucky says. “They don’t know they have the tools they need right there in their hands.”

The census helps determine, among other things, how state and federal dollars are distributed to local communities. Estimates say it can mean as much as $1,600 per person for an area. “That [960 families] is almost recovered for the state,” Lucky says, “and, we’ll make sure, for the Black Belt.”

Even more imperative now than getting every Black Belt resident counted is ensuring they are tested for COVID-19, the virus that is the source of our global pandemic. Particularly since it is clear as a Black Belt Sunday sky that the novel coronavirus disproportionately infects — and kills — African Americans. In the Black Belt, 65 percent of the population is black.

Once again, Lucy says, the region is being ignored and overlooked.

“We know beyond any shadow of a doubt that there are many people not being tested here,” she says.

Lucky’s lobbied for more mobile testing units to traverse the region’s vast corners, many of them rural yet worthy of being tested.

“You can’t tell me my life is less valuable,” she says.

As of Tuesday, only five of the 12 counties BBCF serves, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health, had conducted more than even just 100 tests, a minuscule number given the head count in the counties: Marengo (227 tests, pop. 20,000) Dallas (179, pop. 37,000), Pickens (139, pop. 20,000), Hale (106, pop. 14,700) and Wilcox (102, pop. 10,600).

“That’s ridiculous,” Lucky says. And a potential powder keg of infection.

“People are talking about flattening the curve,” Lucky says, “We’re not even at the curve yet.”

Lucky says she knows of one Sumter County resident who died of COVID-19 at a Tuscaloosa hospital, yet the state still lists zero deaths in the county.

“That gives people a false sense of hope that we’re not seeing deaths [due to coronavirus],” she says. “We know that is not the case.”

Only if no one is looking. Again.

A voice for what’s right and wrong in Birmingham, Alabama (and beyond), Roy’s column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as in the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com and follow him at twitter.com/roysj