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.

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