Birmingham, Alabama

Birmingham is a city in the north central region of Alabama in the United States and the county seat of Jefferson County. It is the third most populous city in the state, and its metropolitan area, with over 1.19 million residents, is the largest in Alabama. The city was founded on 1 June 1871 by the Elyton Land Company, formed from three smaller communities, most notably Elyton, and named for the English city of Birmingham. Its rapid growth from 1881 to 1920 on mining, steel production and railroads earned it the nicknames the Magic City and the Pittsburgh of the South. Birmingham was a major site of the civil rights movement, notably in the 1963 campaign led by Fred Shuttlesworth with Martin Luther King Jr. Today its economy rests on banking, medicine, higher education and manufacturing, and it has a humid subtropical climate.