Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama, the largest metropolitan area in the state, and the state's third-most populous city. Birmingham was founded in 1871 as the merger of three pre-American Civil War towns, and it was named for the English industrial city of Birmingham due to its founders' intent for Birmingham, Alabama to be a center of the iron, steel, and railroad industries. Cheap, non-unionized, and often Black laborers from rural Alabama were employed in the city's steel mills and blast furnaces, enabling Birmingham to rival the industrial centers of the North and Midwest at the same time as the Great Migration of Black laborers out of the Jim Crow-era American South. Birmingham was a primary industry center of the South until the 1960s, and it was nicknamed "the Pittsburgh of the South". The Great Depression led to an influx of poor farmers into Birmingham, and New Deal programs provided employment to the city's struggling laborers. During the 1950s and 1960s, Birmingham became a center of the national Civil Rights movement, locally led by Fred Shuttlesworth, and the frequency of white supremacist terrorist attacks against the Black community (such as the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing) led to the city being nicknamed "Bombingham". The civil rights agitation in Birmingham, aided by Martin Luther King Jr. and his "Letter from Birmingham Jail", played a major role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. During the 1970s, Birmingham experienced urban renewal, and, in 1979, Richard Arrington Jr. was elected Birmingham's first Black mayor. At the same time, the city's population declined due to "white flight". By 2020, Birmingham had a population of 200,733 people, of whom 68.12% were Black, 22.91% white, 4.62% Hispanic, 2.5% mixed, 1.62% Asian, .17% Indian, and .05% Pacific Islander.
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