Last Tuesday’s special election in Alabama has raised hopes that the 2018 midterms could be a wave election that sweeps in a more progressive Congress. Many are crediting African Americans, particularly African-American women, for turning out in droves and helping push Democrat Doug Jones across the finish line.

So what lessons, with a week of hindsight, should we be drawing from Jones’s upset win? And what role can Black Belt voters play in pushing the country left?

Named for its rich soil and the large number of African Americans living there — descendants of slaves who worked the region’s plantations — the Black Belt has long occupied an important place in American history, particularly radical politics. In the 1920s, Communist Party member Harry Haywood promulgated his “Black Belt Thesis,” which argued that the stretch of land was a “nation within a nation.” African Americans, in his estimation, were not just an oppressed group within the US — they also deserved self-determination.