Alabama

A cotton state that became the stage on which the civil rights movement won its central arguments. Alabama was Creek and Cherokee country until the Creek War of 1813 and 1814, which Andrew Jackson ended at Horseshoe Bend, opening the Black Belt - named for its dark prairie soil - to cotton planting worked by enslaved people moved from the upper South in the largest forced migration in American history. Statehood came in 1819. Montgomery was the first Confederate capital. After Reconstruction the 1901 constitution disenfranchised almost all Black voters and most poor white ones, and the convict leasing system supplied forced labour to mines and mills into the 1920s. Birmingham grew as a steel city on local coal, iron and limestone. The movement then made the state its proving ground: the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, the Birmingham campaign and church bombing of 1963, and the Selma to Montgomery march of March 1965, whose televised beating of marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge produced the Voting Rights Act within five months. Shelby County v Holder, which struck down that act's coverage formula in 2013, also came from Alabama. Huntsville built the rockets for the moon landings. Birmingham is the largest city and Montgomery the capital. The state's name comes from a Muskogean people. Mobile held the first American Mardi Gras, predating New Orleans. The boll weevil monument at Enterprise honours the insect that forced farmers off cotton. Alabama's constitution is the longest of any government in the world, having been amended more than nine hundred times.

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