The city was planned and named as Selma by William R. King, a politician and planter from North Carolina who was a future vice president of the United States.

[5] During the Civil War, Selma was one of the South's main military manufacturing centers, producing many supplies and munitions, and building Confederate warships such as the ironclad Tennessee.

[6] This strategic concentration of manufacturing capabilities eventually made Selma a target of Union raids into Alabama late in the Civil War.

[clarification needed] Gen. Rousseau made a dash in the direction of Selma, but was misled by his guides and struck the railroad forty miles east of Montgomery.

[clarification needed] [8] On March 30, 1865, Union General James H. Wilson detached Gen. John T. Croxton's brigade to destroy all Confederate property at Tuscaloosa.

The Federal commander's plan was for Upton to send in a 300-man detachment after dark to cross the swamp on the Confederate right; enter the works, and begin a flanking movement toward the center moving along the line of fortifications.

At 5 pm, however, Gen. Eli Long's ammunition train in the rear was attacked by advance elements of Forrest's scattered forces approaching Selma.

Long's troops attacked in a single rank in three main lines, dismounted and shooting their Spencer's carbines, supported by their own artillery fire.

The Southern artillery had only solid shot on hand, while a short distance away was an arsenal which produced tons of canister, a highly effective anti-personnel ammunition.

They escaped in the darkness by swimming across the Alabama River near the mouth of Valley Creek (where the present day Battle of Selma Reenactment is held.)

As in other southern states, white Democrats regained political power in the mid-1870s after suppressing black voting through violence and fraud; Reconstruction officially ended in 1877 when federal troops were withdrawn.

In June 1893, a lynch mob numbering 100 men seized "a black man named Daniel Edwards from the Selma jail, hanged him from a tree, and fired multiple rounds into his body" for allegedly becoming intimate with a white woman.

[9] In 1901, the state legislature passed a new constitution with electoral provisions, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, that effectively disenfranchised most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites, leaving them without representation in government, and deprived them of participation in juries and other forms of citizenship.

Especially in the post-World War II period, legal challenges by the NAACP against Southern discriminatory laws enabled blacks to more freely exercise their constitutional rights as citizens.

In the 1960s, black people who pushed the boundaries, attempting to eat at "white-only" lunch counters or sit in the downstairs "white" section of movie theaters, were still beaten and arrested.

Black people were prevented from registering to vote by means of a literacy test, administered in a subjective way, as well as through economic retaliation organized by the White Citizens' Council in response to civil rights activism, Ku Klux Klan violence and police repression.

After the Supreme Court case Smith v. Allwright (1944) ended the use of white primaries by the Democratic Party, the Alabama state legislature passed a law giving voting registrars more authority to challenge prospective voters under the literacy test.

[13] Against fierce opposition from Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark and his volunteer posse, black people continued their voter registration and desegregation efforts, which expanded during 1963 and the first part of 1964.

Defying intimidation, economic retaliation, arrests, firings and beatings, an ever-increasing number of Dallas County blacks tried to register to vote, but few were able to do so under the subjective system administered by whites.

[14] In the summer of 1964, a sweeping injunction issued by local judge James Hare barred any gathering of three or more people under sponsorship of SNCC, SCLC or DCVL, or with the involvement of 41 named civil rights leaders.

This injunction temporarily halted civil-rights activity until Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. defied it by speaking to a crowd about the struggle at Brown Chapel AME Church on January 2, 1965.

[15] Beginning in January 1965, SCLC and SNCC initiated a revived voting-rights campaign designed to focus national attention on the systematic denial of black voting rights in Alabama, and particularly in Selma.

Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was unarmed, was killed in a café in nearby Marion after state police broke up a peaceful protest in the town.

King and other civil-rights leaders filed for court protection for a third, larger-scale march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital.

Frank Minis Johnson, Jr., the federal district court judge for the area who reviewed the injunction, decided in favor of the demonstrators, saying: The law is clear that the right to petition one's government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups ... and these rights may be exercised by marching, even along public highways.On Sunday, March 21, 1965, approximately 3,200 marchers departed for Montgomery.

It provided for federal oversight and enforcement of voting rights for all citizens in state or jurisdictions where patterns of underrepresentation showed discrimination against certain populations such as ethnic minorities.

Industries in Selma include International Paper, Bush Hog (agricultural equipment), Plantation Patterns, American Apparel, and Peerless Pump Company (LaBour), Renasol, and Hyundai.

[29] As part of its Civil War history, a monument to native Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate General, was installed in Old Live Oak Cemetery.

In August 2012, plans were announced to build a larger monument, more resistant to vandalism, but many African Americans object to it because of his established history as a postwar leader with the KKK and his earlier involvement in the massacre of black Union troops at Fort Pillow.

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