ALAlabama Famous People

Monroeville is a county seat in south Alabama with a courthouse square and not much traffic, and two children who lived a few doors apart there grew up to shape postwar American prose. Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville on April 28, 1926, published To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960 and took the Pulitzer for fiction the following year. Her childhood neighbour was Truman Capote, born in New Orleans but sent to Monroeville relatives as a small boy, and Lee wrote him into the novel as Dill. Capote repaid it by taking her to Kansas in 1959 as his researcher for In Cold Blood.

The vice president who never reached Washington

No president has been born in Alabama. The state's nearest brush with the executive branch was William Rufus King, a North Carolinian who moved to the Alabama Territory, named the town of Selma after a place in the Ossian poems, and held one of Alabama's Senate seats for close to three decades. Elected vice president on Franklin Pierce's ticket in 1852, King was in Cuba dying of tuberculosis when the term began, and Congress passed a special act allowing him to be sworn in on foreign soil at Matanzas in March 1853. He sailed home to his plantation near Selma and died on April 18, 45 days into the job, having never presided over the Senate.

One Alabamian did reach the top of the judiciary. Hugo Black, born in the Clay County settlement of Harlan in 1886, ran a Birmingham police court, joined the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s while building a political base, won a Senate seat, and then sat on the US Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971, where he became its most literal reader of the First Amendment and joined the unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma

Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee on February 4, 1913, and was working as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store when she refused to move on December 1, 1955. Coretta Scott was born in Heiberger, in Perry County, in 1927, and met Martin Luther King Jr. while studying in Boston. John Lewis, the son of sharecroppers outside Troy, was 25 when state troopers fractured his skull at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, and he went on to represent Georgia in Congress from 1987 until his death in 2020.

Fred Shuttlesworth, the Birmingham minister whose parsonage was dynamited on Christmas night in 1956, walked out of the rubble unhurt and co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference the next year. Angela Davis grew up on the Birmingham hillside residents called Dynamite Hill because of how often the houses of Black families were bombed. Condoleezza Rice, born in Birmingham in 1954 and later secretary of state, was a childhood acquaintance of Denise McNair, one of the four girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing on September 15, 1963.

Mobile sent five men to Cooperstown

The port city of Mobile has produced five Baseball Hall of Famers: Hank Aaron, Satchel Paige, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams and Ozzie Smith. Aaron, born there on February 5, 1934, passed Babe Ruth with his 715th home run on April 8, 1974, and finished with 755. Elsewhere in the state, Willie Mays came out of Westfield near Birmingham, Charles Barkley out of Leeds, and Bo Jackson out of Bessemer before winning the 1985 Heisman Trophy at Auburn.

Jesse Owens was born in Oakville, in Lawrence County, in 1913, and won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Joe Louis was born in a sharecropper's cabin in Chambers County in 1914 and moved to Detroit at 12. Both left Alabama as children, and neither could have competed in the state as adults.

From the Shoals to the charts

W. C. Handy was born in a log cabin in Florence in 1873, published "Memphis Blues" in 1912 and "St. Louis Blues" two years later, and is the reason the Tennessee Valley claims the blues as much as the Delta does. Hank Williams was born near Georgiana in 1923, wrote most of the country canon before he was 29 and died in the back of a Cadillac on New Year's Day 1953. Nat King Cole was born in Montgomery in 1919 and taken to Chicago as a toddler.

Sun Ra was born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham in 1914 before deciding he came from Saturn. Lionel Richie grew up on the campus of Tuskegee Institute and formed the Commodores there. Percy Sledge was a hospital orderly in Leighton when he recorded "When a Man Loves a Woman" in 1966. Emmylou Harris was born in Birmingham in 1947.

Names that catch people out

• Helen Keller, born at Ivy Green in Tuscumbia in 1880, lost sight and hearing to an illness before she was two, and the water pump where Anne Sullivan broke through still stands in the yard.
• Zelda Sayre was a Montgomery judge's daughter who met Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918 while he was stationed at nearby Camp Sheridan.
• Tallulah Bankhead was born in Huntsville in 1902; her father, William Bankhead, was Speaker of the US House from 1936 to 1940.
• Mae Jemison was born in Decatur in 1956 and became the first Black woman in space aboard Endeavour in September 1992.
• Octavia Spencer (Montgomery, 1970), Courteney Cox (Birmingham, 1964) and Channing Tatum (Cullman, 1980) are all Alabama-born.

Alabama people, common questions

Explore further