The enduring popularity of her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), as well as its film and stage adaptations, has attracted tourists to the city and area.

Monroeville is also central to the 2019 film Just Mercy, based upon the 2014 eponymous book by Bryan Stevenson, recounting the wrongful conviction and sentencing to death of African American Walter McMillian.

In historic times, it was primarily the territory of the Muscogee or Creek peoples, who became known to European-American settlers as one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast.

He was of Creek and European descent, and had adopted the system of chattel slavery to gain workers for his plantation and horse breeding.

The legislature passed a new constitution in 1901 that disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites, excluding them from the political system.

The legislators also passed laws imposing racial segregation and other forms of Jim Crow, and centralized power in the legislature.

Racial terrorism was perpetrated through lynchings of African Americans, mostly of men, which took place outside the justice system.

They were often conducted as public displays on the courthouse square, spectacles attended by large white mobs in an enactment of their power.

[4] The county seat, Monroeville, is the home of two notable 20th-century authors, Truman Capote and Nelle Harper Lee, who were childhood neighbors.

The novelist Mark Childress and journalist Cynthia Tucker are also Monroe County natives.

He has worked since his early 20s in Montgomery, establishing the Equal Justice Initiative and serving as legal counsel for people on death row in Alabama prisons.

In 1993 the Alabama Appeals Court ruled that McMillian should be freed because of the lack of evidence, his alibi, the unreliability of witnesses, and mishandling of the trial.