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Alabama's slaves were freed by the 13th Amendment in 1865.

Alabama was under military rule from the end of the war in May 1865 until its official restoration to the Union in 1868.

From 1867 to 1874, with most white citizens barred temporarily from voting and freedmen enfranchised, many African Americans emerged as political leaders in the state.

Alabama was represented in Congress during this period by three African-American congressmen: Jeremiah Haralson, Benjamin S. Turner, and James T. Rapier.

Following the war, the state remained chiefly agricultural, with an economy tied to cotton.

During Reconstruction, state legislators ratified a new state constitution in 1868 which created the state's first public school system and expanded women's rights.

Legislators funded numerous public road and railroad projects, although these were plagued with allegations of fraud and misappropriation.

Organized insurgent, resistance groups tried to suppress the freedmen and Republicans.

Besides the short-lived original Ku Klux Klan, these included the Pale Faces, Knights of the White Camellia, Red Shirts, and the White League.

Reconstruction in Alabama ended in 1874, when the Democrats regained control of the legislature and governor's office through an election dominated by fraud and violence.

They wrote another constitution in 1875, and the legislature passed the Blaine Amendment, prohibiting public money from being used to finance religious-affiliated schools.

The same year, legislation was approved that called for racially segregated schools.

Railroad passenger cars were segregated in 1891.

20th century The new 1901 Constitution of Alabama included provisions for voter registration that effectively disenfranchised large portions of the population, including nearly all African Americans and Native Americans, and tens of thousands of poor European Americans, through making voter registration difficult, requiring a poll tax and literacy test.

The 1901 constitution required racial segregation of public schools.

By 1903 only 2,980 African Americans were registered in Alabama, although at least 74,000 were literate.

This compared to more than 181,000 African Americans eligible to vote in 1900.

The numbers dropped even more in later decades.

The state legislature passed additional racial segregation laws related to public facilities into the 1950s: jails were segregated in 1911; hospitals in 1915; toilets, hotels, and restaurants in 1928; and bus stop waiting rooms in 1945.

While the planter class had persuaded poor whites to vote for this legislative effort to suppress black voting, the new restrictions resulted in their disenfranchisement as well, due mostly to the imposition of a cumulative poll tax.

By 1941, whites constituted a slight majority of those disenfranchised by these laws: 600,000 whites vs. 520,000 African Americans.

Nearly all Blacks had lost the ability to vote.

Despite numerous legal challenges which succeeded in overturning certain provisions, the state legislature would create new ones to maintain disenfranchisement.

The exclusion of blacks from the political system persisted until after passage of federal civil rights legislation in 1965 to enforce their constitutional rights as citizens.

The rural-dominated Alabama legislature consistently underfunded schools and services for the disenfranchised African Americans, but it did not relieve them of paying taxes.

Partially as a response to chronic underfunding of education for African Americans in the South, the Rosenwald Fund began funding the construction of what came to be known as Rosenwald Schools.

In Alabama, these schools were designed, and the construction partially financed with Rosenwald funds, which paid one-third of the construction costs.

The fund required the local community and state to raise matching funds to pay the rest.

Black residents effectively taxed themselves twice, by raising additional monies to supply matching funds for such schools, which were built in many rural areas.

They often donated land and labor as well.

Beginning in 1913, the first 80 Rosenwald Schools were built in Alabama for African American children.

A total of 387 schools, seven teachers' houses, and several vocational buildings were completed by 1937 in the state.

Several of the surviving school buildings in the state are now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Continued racial discrimination and lynchings, agricultural depression, and the failure of the cotton crops due to boll weevil infestation led tens of thousands of African Americans from rural Alabama and other states to seek opportunities in northern and midwestern cities during the early decades of the 20th century as part of the Great Migration out of the South.

Reflecting this emigration, the population growth rate in Alabama (see "historical populations" table below) dropped by nearly half from 1910 to 1920.

At the same time, many rural people migrated to the city of Birmingham to work in new industrial jobs.

Birmingham experienced such rapid growth it was called the "Magic City".

By 1920, Birmingham was the 36th-largest city in the United States.

Heavy industry and mining were the basis of its economy.

Its residents were under-represented for decades in the state legislature, which refused to redistrict after each decennial census according to population changes, as it was required by the state constitution.

This did not change until the late 1960s following a lawsuit and court order.

Industrial development related to the demands of World War II brought a level of prosperity to the state not seen since before the civil war.

Rural workers poured into the largest cities in the state for better jobs and a higher standard of living.

One example of this massive influx of workers occurred in Mobile.

Between 1940 and 1943, more than 89,000 people moved into the city to work for war-related industries.

Cotton and other cash crops faded in importance as the state developed a manufacturing and service base.

Despite massive population changes in the state from 1901 to 1961, the rural-dominated legislature refused to reapportion House and Senate seats based on population, as required by the state constitution to follow the results of decennial censuses.

They held on to old representation to maintain political and economic power in agricultural areas.

One result was that Jefferson County, containing Birmingham's industrial and economic powerhouse, contributed more than one-third of all tax revenue to the state, but did not receive a proportional amount in services.

Urban interests were consistently underrepresented in the legislature.

A 1960 study noted that because of rural domination, "a minority of about 25% of the total state population is in majority control of the Alabama legislature."

In the United States Supreme Court cases of Baker v. Carr (1962) and Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the court ruled that the principle of "one man, one vote" needed to be the basis of both houses of state legislatures, and that their districts had to be based on population rather than geographic counties.

African Americans continued to press in the 1950s and 1960s to end disenfranchisement and segregation in the state through the civil rights movement, including legal challenges.

In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that public schools had to be desegregated, but Alabama was slow to comply.

During the 1960s, under Governor George Wallace, Alabama resisted compliance with federal demands for desegregation.

The civil rights movement had notable events in Alabama, including the Montgomery bus boycott (1955–1956), Freedom Rides in 1961, and 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

These contributed to Congressional passage and enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 by the U.S. Congress.

Legal segregation ended in the states in 1964, but Jim Crow customs often continued until specifically challenged in court.

According to The New York Times, by 2017, many of Alabama's African Americans were living in Alabama's cities such as Birmingham and Montgomery.

Also, the Black Belt region across central Alabama "is home to largely poor counties that are predominantly African-American.

These counties include Dallas, Lowndes, Marengo and Perry."

In 1972, for the first time since 1901, the legislature completed the congressional redistricting based on the decennial census.

This benefited the urban areas that had developed, as well as all in the population who had been underrepresented for more than sixty years.

Other changes were made to implement representative state house and senate districts.

Alabama has made some changes since the late 20th century and has used new types of voting to increase representation.

In the 1980s, an omnibus redistricting case, Dillard v. Crenshaw County, challenged the at-large voting for representative seats of 180 Alabama jurisdictions, including counties and school boards.

At-large voting had diluted the votes of any minority in a county, as the majority tended to take all seats.

Despite African Americans making up a significant minority in the state, they had been unable to elect any representatives in most of the at-large jurisdictions.

As part of settlement of this case, five Alabama cities and counties, including Chilton County, adopted a system of cumulative voting for election of representatives in multi-seat jurisdictions.

This has resulted in more proportional representation for voters.

In another form of proportional representation, 23 jurisdictions use limited voting, as in Conecuh County.

In 1982, limited voting was first tested in Conecuh County.

Together use of these systems has increased the number of African Americans and women being elected to local offices, resulting in governments that are more representative of their citizens.

Beginning in the 1960s, the state's economy shifted away from its traditional lumber, steel, and textile industries because of increased foreign competition.

Steel jobs, for instance, declined from 46,314 in 1950 to 14,185 in 2011.

However, the state, particularly Huntsville, benefited from the opening of the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in 1960, a major facility in the development of the Saturn rocket program and the space shuttle.

Technology and manufacturing industries, such as automobile assembly, replaced some the state's older industries in the late twentieth century, but the state's economy and growth lagged behind other states in the area, such as Georgia and Florida.

21st century In 2001, Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore installed a statue of the Ten Commandments in the capitol in Montgomery.

In 2002, the 11th US Circuit Court ordered the statue removed, but Moore refused to follow the court order, which led to protests around the capitol in favor of keeping the monument.

The monument was removed in August 2003.

A few natural disasters have occurred in the state in the twenty-first century.

In 2004, Hurricane Ivan, a category 3 storm upon landfall, struck the state and caused over $18 billion of damage.

It was among the most destructive storms to strike the state in its modern history.

A super outbreak of 62 tornadoes hit the state in April 2011 and killed 238 people, devastating many communities.

Geography Alabama is the thirtieth-largest state in the United States with of total area: 3.2% of the area is water, making Alabama 23rd in the amount of surface water, also giving it the second-largest inland waterway system in the United States.

About three-fifths of the land area is part of the Gulf Coastal Plain, a gentle plain with a general descent towards the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico.

The North Alabama region is mostly mountainous, with the Tennessee River cutting a large valley and creating numerous creeks, streams, rivers, mountains, and lakes.

Alabama is bordered by the states of Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida to the south, and Mississippi to the west.

Alabama has coastline at the Gulf of Mexico, in the extreme southern edge of the state.

The state ranges in elevation from sea level at Mobile Bay to more than in the northeast, to Mount Cheaha at .

Alabama's land consists of of forest or 67% of the state's total land area.

Suburban Baldwin County, along the Gulf Coast, is the largest county in the state in both land area and water area.

Areas in Alabama administered by the National Park Service include Horseshoe Bend National Military Park near Alexander City; Little River Canyon National Preserve near Fort Payne; Russell Cave National Monument in Bridgeport; Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site in Tuskegee; and Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site near Tuskegee.

Additionally, Alabama has four National Forests: Conecuh, Talladega, Tuskegee, and William B. Bankhead.

Alabama also contains the Natchez Trace Parkway, the Selma To Montgomery National Historic Trail, and the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.

Notable natural wonders include: the "Natural Bridge" rock, the longest natural bridge east of the Rockies, located just south of Haleyville; Cathedral Caverns in Marshall County, named for its cathedral-like appearance, features one of the largest cave entrances and stalagmites in the world; Ecor Rouge in Fairhope, the highest coastline point between Maine and Mexico; DeSoto Caverns in Childersburg, the first officially recorded cave in the United States; Noccalula Falls in Gadsden features a 90-foot waterfall; Dismals Canyon near Phil Campbell, home to two waterfalls, six natural bridges and allegedly served as a hideout for legendary outlaw Jesse James; Stephens Gap Cave in Jackson County boasts a 143-foot pit, two waterfalls and is one of the most photographed wild cave scenes in America; Little River Canyon near Fort Payne, one of the nation's longest mountaintop rivers; Rickwood Caverns near Warrior features an underground pool, blind cave fish and 260-million-year-old limestone formations; and the Walls of Jericho canyon on the Alabama-Tennessee state line.

A -wide meteorite impact crater is located in Elmore County, just north of Montgomery.

This is the Wetumpka crater, the site of "Alabama's greatest natural disaster".

A -wide meteorite hit the area about 80 million years ago.

The hills just east of downtown Wetumpka showcase the eroded remains of the impact crater that was blasted into the bedrock, with the area labeled the Wetumpka crater or astrobleme ("star-wound") because of the concentric rings of fractures and zones of shattered rock that can be found beneath the surface.