Montgomery (Alabama)

Montgomery (Alabama), city in central Alabama, capital of the state, and seat of Montgomery County. A port on the Alabama River, Montgomery is a major cotton and livestock market and a manufacturing center situated in the rich Black Belt agricultural region. Principal manufactures of the area include water heaters, computer software, paper products, machinery, furniture, textiles, and processed food. Tourism, construction, government activity, and financial institutions are also important to the economy of the city, as is nearby Maxwell Air Force Base. Air transportation is through Dannelly Field Airport.

Montgomery is the site of Huntingdon College (1854), Alabama State University (1874), Faulkner University (1942), Troy State University Montgomery (1966), a branch of Auburn University (opened in 1967), and a junior college. Points of interest include the colonial-style State Capitol, which served as the capitol of the Confederacy during the first few months of the American Civil War (1861-1865); the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, featuring displays of American art; and a museum devoted to F. Scott Fitzgerald, located in the house once occupied by the writer.

The Civil Rights Memorial, designed by Vietnam War Memorial artist Maya Lin and dedicated in 1989, honors 40 people who gave their lives between 1954 and 1968 in the fight for racial equality. In 1996 Congress designated the 87-km (54-mi) route of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march a national historic trail. Montgomery is also home to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, one of the world’s largest, with productions staged through most of the year in a spacious performing arts complex.

Two settlements on the site of the present-day city were consolidated and incorporated in 1819 as Montgomery, named for Richard Montgomery, a general in the American Revolution (1775-1783). The city became the center of plantation Alabama because of its central location in the so-called Black Belt, a fertile farming area. The state capital was moved to the city from Tuscaloosa in 1846, and five years later railroad connections had been established to the southwest and northeast. Alabama was among the first states to secede from the Union prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. Delegates from Southern states met in Montgomery and established the provisional government of the Confederate States of America in February 1861. The city, known as the Cradle of the Confederacy, served as the Confederate capital between February and May 1861. Union troops captured Montgomery in April 1865.

In 1956 one of the first major victories of the modern civil rights movement came after a year-long boycott of Montgomery’s segregated bus system by the city’s black community. Led by local minister Martin Luther King, Jr., the boycott resulted in the desegregation of the city’s buses, and its success significantly strengthened the civil rights movement.

Montgomery covers a land area of 402 sq km (155 sq mi), with a mean elevation of 49 m (160 ft). According to the 2000 census, blacks are 49.6 percent of the population, whites 47.7 percent, Asians 1.1 percent, and Native Americans 0.2 percent. Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders represent less than 0.1 percent of the population. The remainder are of mixed heritage or did not report race. Hispanics, who may be of any race, are 1.2 percent of the people. Population 177,857 (1980); 187,106 (1990); 201,568 (2000); 200,127 (2005 estimate).