Alabama is a US state located in the American South, with its capital at Montgomery. The state was a part of France's Louisiana Territory for over a hundred years, with the French founding the major port of Mobile in 1702. In 1803, the United States acquired Alabama from France under the Louisiana Purchase, and Alabama became a slave state, remaining one until the end of the American Civil War in 1865; Alabama had seceded and joined the Confederate States of America. After the Civil War, Alabama was a part of the Southern Democrats' "Solid South", resisting social change and advocating segregation and inequality. The major American city of Birmingham (now the largest in Alabama) was founded in 1871, and the cities of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma would be centers of the African-American Civil Rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. Governor George Wallace and police chief Bull Connor attempted to enforce segregation in the state, but the Civil Rights movement would prevail after years of struggle; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation. Since the transformation of the US Republican Party into a conservative party and the US Democratic Party into a liberal party, Alabama has been a strong Republican state, as most of its working-class whites decided to continue their opposition to Civil Rights. In 2015, Alabama had a population of 4,858,990 people.
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