History of Alabama
Tens of thousands of African Americans from Alabama joined the Great Migration out of the South from 1915 to 1930[4] and moved for better opportunities in industrial cities, mostly in the North and Midwest.
[5][6] As a result of African American disenfranchisement and rural white control of the legislature, state politics were dominated by Democrats, as part of the "Solid South.
In the mid-20th century cotton would fade in economic importance, with mechanization technologies, the reduced need for farm labor, as well as their now being new job opportunities in different industries.
In the mid-to-late 20th century, the formation of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, would help the states economic growth by developing an aerospace industry.
The South Appalachian Mississippian culture Big Eddy phase has been tentatively identified as the protohistoric Province of Tuskaloosa encountered by the de Soto expedition in 1540.
The British Crown defined the portion north of this line as part of the "Illinois Country"; the area west of the Appalachian Mountains was to be reserved for use by Native American tribes.
By the Treaty of Paris (1783), signed the same day, Britain ceded to the newly established United States all of this province north of 31°N, thus laying the foundation for a long controversy.
A strip of land 12 or 14 miles wide near the present northern boundary of Alabama and Mississippi was claimed by South Carolina, as part of the eastern colonies' previous hopeful extensions to the west.
The Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee Nation and other Creek factions remained neutral to or allied with the United States during the war; they were highly decentralized in bands' alliances.
It drew support from planters and townsmen, while the Democrats were strongest among poor farmers and Catholic communities (descendants of French and Spanish colonists) in the Mobile area.
[25] During the agitation over the Wilmot Proviso, which would bar slavery from territory acquired from Mexico as a result of the Mexican War (1848), Yancey induced the Democratic State Convention of 1848 to adopt what was known as the "Alabama Platform".
In antebellum Alabama, wealthy planters created large cotton plantations based in the fertile central Black Belt of the upland region, which depended on the labor of enslaved Africans.
Mills Thornton argues that Whigs worked for positive state action to benefit society as a whole, while the Democrats feared any increase of power in government or in state-sponsored institutions as central banks.
Fears that Northern agitators threatened their value system and slavery as the basis of their wealthy economy made voters ready to secede when Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1860.
Some idea of the current transportation patterns and severe internal logistic problems faced by the Confederacy can be seen by tracing Jefferson Davis' journey from his plantation in Mississippi to Montgomery.
Uncounted thousands of slaves were impressed to work for Confederate troops; they took care of horses and equipment, cooked and did laundry, hauled supplies, and helped in field hospitals.
But the legislature's passage of Black Codes to control the freedmen who were flocking from the plantations to the towns, and its rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment to grant suffrage, intensified Congressional hostility to the Presidential plan.
[31] The new Republican party, made up of freedmen, southern white Union sympathizers (scalawags), and northerners who had settled in the South (carpetbaggers), took control two years after the war ended.
At the end of WWII, for instance, in the black Collegeville community of Birmingham, only eleven voters in a population of 8,000 African Americans were deemed "eligible" to register to vote.
[39] Reforms that were enacted included the corrupt practices act of 1915; the registration law of 1915; the direct election of U.S. senators; encouraging the establishment of commission government in the towns and cities; and the ratification of the 19th amendment to allow women the right to vote.
The progressives worked hard to upgrade the hospital and public health system, with provisions to require the registration of births and deaths to provide the information needed.
The cities of Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile quickly adopted the commission form[47] Women energized by the prohibition wars turned their crusading energies to woman suffrage.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, however, caused a significant decline in the state's economy[49] Birmingham was founded on June 1, 1871, by real estate promoters who sold lots near the planned crossing of the Alabama & Chattanooga and South & North railroads.
Feldman (1999) has shown that the second KKK was not a mere hate group; it showed a genuine desire for political and social reform on behalf of poor whites.
For example, Alabama Klansmen such as Hugo Black were among the foremost advocates of better public schools, effective Prohibition enforcement, expanded road construction, and other "progressive" measures to benefit poor whites.
It took years and Federal court intervention to achieve the redistricting necessary to establishing "one man, one vote" representation, as a result of Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964).
The Reverends Martin Luther King Jr. and Wyatt Tee Walker, SCLC's president and executive director, respectively, joined other civil rights movement leaders who travelled to Birmingham to help.
He invited high school students to join the marches, as King intended to fill the jails with nonviolent protesters to make a moral argument to the United States.
[53] Redistricting, together with federal oversight of voter registration and election practices, enabled hundreds of thousands of Alabama citizens, both white and black, to vote and participate for the first time in the political system.
[64] In 1974, George Wallace, who as governor stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama in 1963 to block the enrollment of African American students, was re-elected to the governorship for a third term.
