🎺Alabama

The Heart of Dixie · The Yellowhammer State

Alabama sits in the Deep South at the intersection of the Gulf Coast, the Appalachian foothills, and the Black Belt — a crescent of rich, dark soil that shaped the state's cotton economy and its history. Montgomery served as the first capital of the Confederacy and, a century later, as a flashpoint of the Civil Rights Movement.

From French Louisiana to Statehood

Europeans first settled the Alabama coast at Mobile in 1702, making the city one of the oldest in the Deep South. The region passed from French to British to Spanish hands before the young United States acquired it in 1813. Alabama became the 22nd state in 1819 during the cotton boom, which rapidly drew Anglo-American planters and the enslaved workforce they brought with them. By the 1850s it was among the richest states in the nation, wealth built almost entirely on enslaved labor.

Civil War and the Confederacy

Alabama seceded on January 11, 1861. Delegates from six Southern states met in Montgomery the following month to form the Confederate States of America, making Montgomery the first Confederate capital — a distinction it held until the government moved to Richmond, Virginia in May 1861. The First White House of the Confederacy still stands in downtown Montgomery.

Civil Rights Movement

Alabama was central to the struggle for civil rights. Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus, sparking the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott led by a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. In 1963, police used fire hoses and dogs on child demonstrators in Birmingham; the same year, a Ku Klux Klan bomb killed four girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. The Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965 — including "Bloody Sunday" on the Edmund Pettus Bridge — pressured Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.

Rockets and Football

Huntsville is home to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, where Wernher von Braun's team designed the Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the Moon. The city is nicknamed "Rocket City" and now Alabama's largest city by population. Down the road, college football is nearly a state religion — the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide and Auburn University's Tigers meet every year in the Iron Bowl.

Alabama Facts

• Alabama has more miles of inland waterways than any other state.
• The first 9-1-1 emergency phone call in the United States was made in Haleyville, Alabama in 1968.
• The state tree is the longleaf pine; Alabama was once covered in longleaf forests that fueled the naval-stores industry.
• Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia in 1880.
• Alabama produces more peanuts, peaches, and blueberries per capita than most Southern states.

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