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Alabama is where the Civil Rights Movement reached its most dramatic and decisive confrontations — and where the nation was forced to watch what it had allowed.
From the Black Belt to the Bridge
The Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Alabama peoples inhabited the region for thousands of years, building complex societies along the Tennessee, Coosa, and Alabama rivers. Hernando de Soto’s expedition reached Alabama in 1540, and the French established Mobile in 1702 as the first permanent European settlement in the region. Control passed from France to Britain and then to the United States, but the native nations held on until Andrew Jackson’s forced removal in the 1830s — the Trail of Tears — cleared the land for cotton planters.
Alabama entered the Union on December 14, 1819 as the twenty-second state. The Black Belt — named for its rich dark topsoil — became the engine of Alabama’s antebellum economy, its cotton fields worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved people. Montgomery served as the first capital of the Confederacy in 1861, and Jefferson Davis was inaugurated on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol. The state suffered enormously during the Civil War and even more during the violent dismantling of Reconstruction that followed.
The twentieth century brought industry to north Alabama — textile mills in the Tennessee Valley, steel in Birmingham, which grew so fast it was called “the Pittsburgh of the South.” Birmingham’s iron and steel industry made it the most industrialized city in the Deep South, but also one of the most rigidly segregated. The city’s brutality toward civil rights demonstrators — Bull Connor’s fire hoses and police dogs turned on children in 1963 — shocked the world and accelerated the Civil Rights Act.
The Civil Rights Movement found its defining geography in Alabama. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus on December 1, 1955, launching a boycott that lasted 381 days and ended bus segregation. In Selma, marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 — Bloody Sunday — were beaten by state troopers on national television. Two weeks later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 killed four girls and became one of the movement’s most devastating losses and most powerful calls to action.
Today Alabama balances its civil rights legacy with a diversified economy. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville built the Saturn V rockets that carried Apollo astronauts to the moon, and the city now anchors a major aerospace and defense corridor. The Port of Mobile handles more tonnage than most American ports. Auburn and Alabama universities sustain an SEC football rivalry that divides the state every November with a ferocity that outsiders find difficult to overstate. The Edmund Pettus Bridge still stands in Selma, and every year thousands walk across it to remember.
1540
De Soto Enters Alabama
Hernando de Soto’s expedition battles the Choctaw at Mabila — a devastating engagement that leaves hundreds dead on both sides and sends the Spaniards retreating toward the Mississippi.
1702
Mobile Founded
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville establishes Mobile on the bay — the first permanent European settlement in Alabama and one of the oldest cities in the southeastern United States.
1819
Statehood
Alabama enters the Union on December 14 as the twenty-second state, with Huntsville briefly serving as its first capital before Montgomery takes over in 1846.
1861
First Confederate Capital
Montgomery serves as the Confederacy’s first capital. Jefferson Davis is inaugurated on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol — the same steps where George Wallace will shout “segregation forever” a century later.
1871
Birmingham Founded
Birmingham is incorporated at the crossing of two railroad lines near iron ore, coal, and limestone deposits. Within twenty years it is the fastest-growing industrial city in the South.
1955
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat on December 1. The 381-day boycott that follows ends bus segregation and launches Martin Luther King Jr. onto the national stage.
1963
16th Street Church Bombing
Klansmen bomb the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on September 15, killing four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.
1965
Bloody Sunday
State troopers attack marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on March 7. The televised footage shocks the nation. President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act five months later.
1969
Saturn V to the Moon
The Saturn V rocket, designed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, carries Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon. Alabama builds the machine that takes humanity to another world.
2013
Shelby County v. Holder
The Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance formula in a case brought by Shelby County, Alabama — the state where the act was born returns to the court to dismantle it.
