Alabama

Human habitation of the Southeast began between 15,000 and 11,500 years ago in the Paleoindian period. It was followed by the Archaic period, roughly 10,500 to 3,000 years ago, and by the Woodland period, when pottery developed. During the Mississippian period chiefdoms arose in the region, among them the center at Moundville in Hale County, known for its tall Temple Mound.⁠[1]

About a year after landing in present-day FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, Hernando de Soto reached the Coosa River in 1540. On October 18 of that year his expedition fought the Battle of Mabila, in which an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 people were killed. After 1540 a pandemic killed perhaps three-fourths of the Indian peoples of the region.⁠[1]

Beginning in the seventeenth century, Creek settlements formed along the central Chattahoochee River, the lower Tallapoosa River and the central Coosa River. This area of present-day east-central Alabama remained the heart of Creek country for about two centuries.⁠[2]

In 1702 French explorers reached the Mobile area and first settled at Twenty-Seven Mile Bluff, up the Mobile River. After flooding in 1711 the settlement moved downriver, and from 1711 to 1720 it was the capital of French Louisiana. In 1717 the French built Fort Toulouse at the confluence of the Tallapoosa and Coosa rivers.⁠[1]

In 1789 Spain built Fort San Esteban at the site of St. Stephens. After a boundary survey placed the fort in U.S. territory, Spain abandoned it, and U.S. Lieutenant John McLary raised the American flag there on May 5, 1799.⁠[3]

In April 1798 Congress created the Mississippi Territory from lands north of the 31st parallel that the State of GeorgiaGeorgia (U.S. state)The State of Georgia is a U.S. state in the Deep South whose capital and largest city is Atlanta. It ratified the U.S. Constitution on January 2, 1788, becoming the 4th state, and had a population of 10,711,908 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry had claimed; the area of present-day Alabama was originally part of that territory.⁠[4]

Washington County, created on June 4, 1800, when the area was part of the Mississippi Territory, is the oldest county in Alabama.⁠[5]

On March 27, 1814, Andrew Jackson defeated the Red Sticks at Horseshoe Bend in present-day Tallapoosa County. The Treaty of Fort Jackson, signed on August 9 of that year, ended the Creek War of 1813–1814 and forced the Creeks to cede more than 21 million acres in the Mississippi Territory, mostly in present-day central and southern Alabama, with part in the southern part of the State of Georgia.⁠[6]

On March 3, 1817, Congress carved the Alabama Territory from the eastern half of the Mississippi Territory and named William Wyatt Bibb its governor; MississippiMississippiMississippi is a state of the United States on the Gulf of Mexico; Jackson is both its capital and its largest city. It was admitted to the Union on December 10, 1817, as the 20th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 2,961,279.Open the full entry became a state the same year.⁠[4][1]

St. Stephens, on the Tombigbee River north of Mobile, was the seat of the territorial government from 1817 to 1819. With no permanent capitol yet built, the first territorial legislature met at the Douglass Hotel in January 1818.⁠[3][7]

An 1818 census counted nearly 68,000 residents in the territory, more than the roughly 60,000 needed to write a constitution and seek statehood.⁠[7]

President James Monroe signed the enabling act on March 2, 1819. From July 5 to August 2, 1819, forty-four delegates from across the territory met in the temporary capital of Huntsville and unanimously elected John Williams Walker president of the convention. The constitution was unanimously adopted on July 30 and took effect when the convention closed on August 2.⁠[8][9][4]

The 1819 constitution established three branches of government with a bicameral legislature. It gave the vote to white men aged 21 or older who had lived in the state for more than a year, without educational or property requirements, and it protected slavery by barring the legislature from emancipating enslaved people without their owners’ consent.⁠[8]

In September 1819 Alabama held its first elections for state officials, and William Wyatt Bibb was elected the first governor; the first state legislature met in Huntsville that fall. On December 14, Monroe signed the congressional resolution accepting the state’s constitution, formally admitting Alabama.⁠[7][4]

The capital was at Cahaba from 1820 to 1825 and at Tuscaloosa from 1826 to 1846. In 1846 the legislature chose Montgomery; its Greek Revival statehouse, completed in 1847, burned in December 1849, and the replacement completed in 1851 still serves as the capitol.⁠[10][11]

In 1820 Alabama had 85,500 whites (67 percent of the population) and 42,500 enslaved people (33 percent); by 1840 the figures were 335,000 (57 percent) and 255,500 (43 percent), and by 1860, 526,000 (55 percent) and 438,000 (45 percent). Alabama produced a little under 4 percent of U.S. cotton in 1820, and by 1849 it led all states with 23 percent. The state established its first statewide school system in 1854.⁠[1]

On March 24, 1832, Creek delegates agreed to the Treaty of Cusseta, which set the terms of their removal. After an attempted Creek uprising was defeated in 1836 during the Second Creek War, the U.S. government carried out immediate forced removal, and a year later 5,000 more Creeks departed. By 1837 the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws and Cherokees had lost virtually all of their holdings in the state, and the vast majority were relocated to reservations in present-day OklahomaOklahomaOklahoma is a U.S. state whose capital is Oklahoma City. It was admitted to the Union on November 16, 1907, as the 46th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,959,353.Open the full entry.⁠[2][1]

In January 1861 a state convention voted 61 to 39 to leave the Union, and the 1861 constitution replaced that of 1819. Montgomery hosted the convention that formed the Confederate States of America and served as its provisional capital for about three months, until Richmond, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, took over in May 1861.⁠[1][8][11]

Slightly fewer than 100,000 Alabama men served in the Confederate military; about a tenth of them deserted, mostly after the defeats of July 1863. About 5,000 African Americans served in the Union Army.⁠[1]

In 1865 federal troops began overseeing emancipation in Alabama through the Freedmen’s Bureau, beginning Presidential Reconstruction; in 1867 the Republican-dominated Congress took control of the process. The election of George S. Houston as governor in 1874 returned the ex-Confederate faction to the governor’s office and ended Reconstruction in Alabama, earlier than the national end in 1877.⁠[12]

In 1875 the state wrote a new conservative constitution.⁠[1]

The state constitution written in 1868 is known as the “Reconstruction Constitution.” In July 1868 Alabama was formally readmitted to the Union.⁠[13]

Birmingham was founded in 1871 where two rail lines crossed, and the state legislature chartered the city on December 19 of that year. It was named after Birmingham, England, a center of that country’s iron industry, and later earned the nickname “Pittsburgh of the South.” In 1907 U.S. Steel purchased the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (TCI).⁠[14]

The state’s railroad track grew from 1,800 miles in 1880 to 5,200 miles by 1910. Birmingham passed 100,000 residents early in the twentieth century, becoming the third most populous city in the South.⁠[1]

On April 23, 1901, a referendum calling a constitutional convention passed, aided by substantial electoral fraud in the Black Belt. The convention assembled on May 21, elected John B. Knox president the next day and ended on September 3 after 82 days of meetings. On November 11 voters approved the constitution, 108,613 to 81,734.⁠[15]

Article VIII of the constitution set voter-registration requirements, including a cumulative poll tax of $1.50 a year for voters aged 21 through 45, a literacy test, and employment and property qualifications, which disfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites. More than 800 amendments have been added since 1901.⁠[15][1]

The boll weevil reached Alabama in 1910, and in 1914 farmers planted 4 million acres of cotton. In 1940 some 1,340,000 Alabamians still lived on farms, and the 1950 federal census was the first to show that most Alabamians no longer farmed.⁠[1]

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to give up her bus seat. The boycott began on December 5, the day of her trial, with about 30,000 African Americans taking part; the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed that day and elected Martin Luther King Jr., pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, as its president.⁠[16][17]

In June 1956 a federal court ruled in Browder v. Gayle, and on November 13, 1956, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lower-court ruling that segregation on Montgomery buses was unconstitutional. Montgomery’s buses were desegregated on December 21.⁠[16][17]

The Birmingham campaign against segregation began on April 3, 1963, and on May 10 King announced an agreement for gradual desegregation. On September 15, 1963, a bomb at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killed four girls aged 11 to 14: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair and Carole Robertson.⁠[17]

On March 7, 1965, state troopers and members of the Dallas County posse attacked marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, an event known as “Bloody Sunday.” On March 9 King led 2,500 marchers to the site of the attack and then turned the march around on police instructions. On March 21 he led 8,000 demonstrators out of Selma under the protection of National Guard troops and federal marshals; the march reached Montgomery on March 25, where King addressed a crowd of about 25,000 at the capitol.⁠[18][17]

In August 1965 Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which banned literacy tests. In 1996 an act of Congress created the Selma to Montgomery National Voting Rights Trail.⁠[17][18]

In 1992 Mercedes-Benz located its first North American plant in Vance, between Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. Total state exports exceeded $10 billion for the first time in 2005, and by 2007 auto production in Alabama neared one million units a year.⁠[1]

On April 26, 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau delivered the 2020 census apportionment results to the President. Alabama’s apportionment population was 5,030,053, giving it seven seats in the U.S. House of Representatives; for the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections it has nine electoral votes, two for its senators plus one for each of its seven congressional districts.⁠[19][20][21]

On November 8, 2022, voters ratified a revised and reorganized state constitution intended to remove racist language, drop repealed provisions and organize the document more clearly. Nearly 1,000 amendments had been added to the 1901 constitution since its adoption.⁠[13]

In U.S. Census Bureau 2010 measurements, Alabama has a total area of 52,420 square miles (135,767 square kilometers), of which 50,645 square miles (131,171 square kilometers) is land and 1,775 square miles (4,597 square kilometers) is water. Its highest point is Cheaha Mountain, 2,407 feet above sea level, and its lowest point is sea level at the boundary with the Gulf of Mexico.⁠[22][10]

The Alabama River is the state’s largest river, part of the fourth-largest river system in the United States by discharge, emptying about 62,500 cubic feet per second into Mobile Bay. The Tombigbee River joins it in south Alabama to form the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, the second-largest delta in the country after the Mississippi Delta. The state’s natural regions include the Coastal Plain, the Wiregrass, the Black Belt, the Piedmont, the Tennessee Valley and the Appalachian northeast.⁠[1]

Alabama has 67 counties; the newest, Houston County, was created on February 9, 1903.⁠[5]

The governor is elected by popular vote every four years and may serve at most two consecutive terms. The 1901 constitution originally barred consecutive terms; Amendment 282, adopted in 1968, allowed two successive terms. A governor must be at least 30 years old and meet state and U.S. residency requirements.⁠[23]

As of November 2026 the governor is Kay Ivey. She was sworn in as the 54th governor on April 10, 2017, began her first full term on January 14, 2019, and was sworn in for a second full term on January 16, 2023.⁠[24][25]

The U.S. Census Bureau estimated Alabama’s population at 5,193,088 on July 1, 2025, from an April 1, 2020, estimates base of 5,025,437. The 2010 census (April 1, 2010) counted 4,779,736 residents. Population density in 2020 was 99.2 people per square mile.⁠[26]

Census Bureau estimates put the population at 67.3 percent White alone, 25.9 percent Black alone, 1.1 percent American Indian and Alaska Native alone, 1.8 percent Asian alone and 3.9 percent two or more races; 6.5 percent were Hispanic or Latino and 62.5 percent White alone, not Hispanic or Latino. In 2020–2024, 4.0 percent of residents were foreign-born, 28.4 percent of people aged 25 and over held a bachelor’s degree or higher, and median household income was $63,999 (in 2024 dollars).⁠[26]

The Poarch Band of Creek Indians, the only federally recognized tribe in Alabama, is based on a 230-acre reservation in Escambia County and has 2,340 members.⁠[2]

In the 2020 census Birmingham had 210,928 residents and Montgomery 199,054.⁠[14][11]

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis data put Alabama’s nominal GDP in 2025 at $339,035.1 million.⁠[27]

In 2020 Census Bureau estimates, educational services, health care and social assistance accounted for 22.7 percent of Alabama’s workforce, manufacturing for 14.2 percent, retail trade for 11.6 percent, and professional, scientific, administrative and waste management services for 9.6 percent.⁠[1]

Birmingham lost 25,000 steel-related jobs between 1950 and 1970; the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is now the city’s largest employer, with 18,750 employees. Huntsville built up engineering and is home to the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center. By 2007 catfish aquaculture had become a half-billion-dollar industry in the state.⁠[1][14]

A 1908 state report found that African Americans made up 44 percent of the school population but received 12 percent of education funding. Auburn University and Alabama A&M are land-grant universities that supported agricultural research and extension; Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) was where George Washington Carver and Thomas Monroe Campbell worked; and UAB has a medical school.⁠[1]

Harper Lee won a Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird, and Shirley Ann Grau and T. S. Stribling also won Pulitzers. The Alabama Shakespeare Festival began in Anniston in the early 1970s and moved to Montgomery in the following decade; it stages about 400 performances a year for about 300,000 patrons. Musicians associated with the state include Hank Williams, Nat “King” Cole, W. C. Handy, Lionel Richie and Emmylou Harris.⁠[1]

Joe Louis held the world heavyweight title for 13 years. In May 1935 Jesse Owens set three world records and tied another in under an hour, and he won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Paul “Bear” Bryant won six national championships as Alabama’s football coach. Mother Angelica founded a ministry in Irondale in 1957 and launched the Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) in 1981.⁠[1]

The Alabama Department of Archives and History states that the name comes from a southern Indian tribe whose habitat was in present-day central Alabama and from a major waterway named for that group; the popular “Here We Rest” meaning is unsupported, and the Choctaw scholar Rev. Allen Wright translated the name as “thicket clearers.”⁠[5]

Alabama has no official nickname; it is often called the “Heart of Dixie” and also the “Cotton State” and the “Yellowhammer State.” The state motto, adopted in 1939, is the Latin “Audemus jura nostra defendere” (“We Dare Maintain Our Rights”).⁠[10][5]

The state bird is the yellowhammer (1927), the state flower the camellia (1959, replacing the goldenrod chosen in 1927), the state tree the southern longleaf pine (1997), and the state song “Alabama” (1933); in 2021 the sweet potato became the state vegetable.⁠[5][10]

The state flag, a crimson cross of St. Andrew on a white field, was authorized by the legislature on February 16, 1895; its design is based on the Confederate battle flag, and it is the only state flag that may be displayed as a square. The state seal, a map showing the major rivers, was proposed by territorial governor Bibb in 1817, replaced during Reconstruction and restored as the official seal in 1939; the coat of arms was adopted on March 14, 1939.⁠[10][5]

Office of the Governor of Alabama: Official website: https://governor.alabama.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

Alabama Legislature: Official website: https://alison.legislature.state.al.us/ (opens in a new window).⁠[28]

Alabama Department of Archives and History: Official website: https://archives.alabama.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]