Alabama is a central setting in the book’s account of the transformation of the American South: a place where racial exclusion was enforced through law and political institutions, and where civil-rights mobilization and federal action helped break that system. The Montgomery bus boycott began after Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in a section reserved for whites, and the wider institutional changes that followed extended from voting rights to employment and economic opportunity.

Segregation and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery for refusing to leave a section of a Cleveland Avenue bus reserved for white passengers. The driver, James Blake, called the police; the officers’ report recorded that Parks would not move, and Blake signed a warrant under the Montgomery City Code. She was fined ten dollars plus court fees of four dollars. Parks was already secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose work challenged the institutions of the South.

Her arrest prompted the Montgomery Bus Boycott. By December 3, Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black leaders had organized a coordinated campaign urging Black residents not to ride Montgomery buses. The boycott continued until December 20, 1956, and helped set in motion the process that led the U.S. Supreme Court to rule Alabama and Montgomery’s segregated-bus laws unconstitutional. The episode illustrates how an individual act of resistance, backed by organized collective action, could bring local segregation into a wider political and legal contest.

Political Exclusion and Federal Intervention

The bus system belonged to a broader structure of white political control. In the South, poll taxes and literacy tests had been used to disenfranchise Black voters, with the tests manipulated so that poor and illiterate white people could still vote. Alabama’s institutional order was also shaped by unequal representation: rural areas associated with the planter elite were overrepresented in state legislatures compared with urban areas. In 1962, the Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr established the one-person, one-vote standard, challenging this malapportionment.

Federal intervention mattered because court decisions required implementation. In the 1890s, federal legislation intended to enfranchise Black Southerners had gone unenforced while local law enforcement remained under the control of white elites and the Democratic Party. By the civil-rights era, Black mobilization and the weakening of the South’s political support for segregation made the federal government more willing to act. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed a broad range of segregationist laws and practices; the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibited literacy tests, poll taxes, and other disenfranchising methods and expanded federal oversight of state elections.

Changes in Political and Economic Life

The effects of reform can be seen in voting rates. In Alabama, the share of eligible Black residents voting rose from around 10 percent in 1960 to 50 percent in 1970. Such changes altered elections for local and national offices and weakened the dominant Democratic Party’s political support for institutions that discriminated against Black people.

The opening of political participation also helped change economic institutions. Before the reforms of the 1960s, Black workers were almost entirely excluded from textile-mill jobs; in 1960 they made up about 5 percent of employees in southern textile mills. Their share reached 15 percent by 1970 and 25 percent by 1990. As employment discrimination declined, educational opportunities improved and the southern labor market became more competitive. The region’s per capita income, which in 1940 stood at about half the national level, began rising faster in the late 1940s and 1950s; by 1990 the gap had essentially disappeared.

Alabama in the Southern Transformation

The book presents the end of the South’s extractive institutions not as an automatic consequence of economic development, but as the result of people subjected to discrimination organizing, demanding rights, and pressing for change. In Alabama, the Montgomery boycott made that challenge visible, while federal courts and legislation supplied institutional leverage that local activists could not obtain from the state’s established power structure alone.

This transformation depended on the South’s position within the United States. Unlike elites in a fully independent regime, southern leaders were subject to the U.S. Constitution and federal institutions; civil-rights organizing could carry its demands beyond the region and mobilize the executive, legislature, and courts. Alabama therefore exemplifies how collective action and federal authority could reinforce one another, turning challenges to segregation into wider changes in political participation and economic opportunity.