Alabama Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This Alabama trivia quiz has 98 free questions with answers and covers the Yellowhammer State from Mobile's 1703 Mardi Gras to Huntsville's rockets: the state symbols and nicknames, the capitals it has had, why a town built a monument to a beetle, and the people who came from here, from Helen Keller, Rosa Parks and Hank Aaron to Harper Lee, Nat King Cole and W. C. Handy. It takes in the civil rights landmarks of Montgomery, Selma and Birmingham, Muscle Shoals and 'Sweet Home Alabama', the Iron Bowl, Talladega and Bear Bryant. Easy questions open it (what is the capital?) and the later ones will test people who grew up here (which town was the capital before Montgomery?), so it works for a classroom, a family reunion, a road trip or a bar quiz anywhere in the state. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia entry on the place, person or event, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Alabama's nickname, the Yellowhammer State, comes from what?
A Civil War regiment's uniform
A Civil War regiment's uniform: Alabama soldiers whose uniforms showed yellow like the bird's feathers were dubbed yellowhammers, and the name spread from the troops to the whole state.
Q 02Which nickname has been printed on Alabama's licence plates since the 1950s?
Heart of Dixie
Heart of Dixie went onto the plates by law: a 1951 act ordered every Alabama tag to carry the words beside a small heart, and both are still there.
Q 03Which northern city hosted Alabama's 1819 constitutional convention?
Huntsville
Huntsville hosted the convention and then served as Alabama's first capital, but only briefly: the seat of government moved south the following year.
Q 04Which Alabama city, the state's oldest, was founded in 1702 as capital of French Louisiana?
Mobile
Mobile claims America's oldest Mardi Gras, first celebrated in 1703, fifteen years before New Orleans was even founded.
Q 05Which flower replaced goldenrod as Alabama's official state flower in 1959?
Camellia
Camellia took the title from goldenrod, a native wildflower, although the camellia itself is an import from East Asia; the law was later narrowed to one species, Camellia japonica.
Q 06Which city served as Alabama's capital from 1826 to 1846?
Tuscaloosa
Tuscaloosa lost the seat to Montgomery in 1846 as the state's population shifted; its abandoned capitol became a women's college, burned in 1923 and survives as ruins in a park.
Q 07Montgomery was the first capital of what?
The Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was organised in Montgomery in February 1861 and kept its capital there until the government moved to Richmond, Virginia, that May.
Q 08Which state borders Alabama to the south?
Florida
Florida's Panhandle runs along almost the whole of Alabama's southern edge, leaving Alabama only a short strip of Gulf coast in its southwestern corner.
Q 09What is the highest natural point in Alabama?
Mount Cheaha
Mount Cheaha, about 2,400 feet high, is topped by Bunker Tower, a stone lookout built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
Q 10The Alabama people, who gave the state its name, lived where which two rivers meet to form the Alabama River?
Coosa and Tallapoosa
Coosa and Tallapoosa: the French built Fort Toulouse at the fork of those rivers in 1717 to counter British influence among the tribes living there.
Q 11Which explorer's 1540 expedition produced the first written versions of the name Alabama?
Hernando de Soto
Hernando de Soto's chroniclers wrote the name as Alibamu, Alibamo and Limamu; he had come hunting for gold, and died of fever beside the Mississippi River two years later.
Q 12Alabama's 1901 constitution, replaced in 2022, was widely described as the world's what?
Longest constitution
Longest constitution: the 1901 text left counties so little power that even local matters needed amendments, and the hundreds added over a century made it the longest in the world.
Q 13Which 26-year-old pastor was elected to lead the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1955?
Q 21Which NASA centre, established in Alabama in 1960, designed the Saturn V Moon rocket?
Marshall Space Flight Center
Marshall Space Flight Center's first director was Wernher von Braun, who had built V-2 rockets for Nazi Germany before the US Army put his team to work in Alabama.
Q 22Which Birmingham landmark made pig iron for nearly ninety years and is now an industrial museum?
Sloss Furnaces
Sloss Furnaces went cold in the early 1970s and faced demolition until 1977, when Birmingham put up about $3 million to preserve the site as a museum of industry.
Q 23Which Alabama city is nicknamed 'The Peanut Capital of the World'?
Dothan
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was chosen partly because he was new in town: as Rosa Parks put it, he had not been in Montgomery long enough to make strong friends or enemies.
Q 14Which 15-year-old was arrested for keeping her Montgomery bus seat, before Rosa Parks?
Claudette Colvin
Claudette Colvin was arrested nine months before Parks; movement leaders chose not to build their case around a teenager, yet she became a plaintiff in the lawsuit that ended bus segregation.
Q 15The 'Bloody Sunday' attack on the first Selma to Montgomery march happened on which structure?
Edmund Pettus Bridge
On the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers and a mounted posse charged about 600 unarmed marchers on March 7, 1965; the Voting Rights Act followed that August.
Q 16Which Alabama governor famously resisted federal desegregation demands in the 1960s?
George Wallace
George Wallace, governor from 1963, made his 'Stand in the Schoolhouse Door' at the University of Alabama in June 1963 to block two Black students from enrolling.
Q 17Who designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, a black granite table with water flowing over it?
Maya Lin
Maya Lin, already famous for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, took the flowing water from a line in the 'I Have a Dream' speech about justice rolling down like waters.
Q 18Helen Keller, born in Tuscumbia, lost her sight and hearing from illness at what age?
19 months
19 months: an illness in early 1882 left Helen Keller deaf and blind; she met teacher Anne Sullivan in March 1887 at her Tuscumbia home, Ivy Green.
Q 19Booker T. Washington became the first leader of which Alabama school in 1881?
Tuskegee Institute
Tuskegee Institute opened on July 4, 1881, in a room lent by a church, with 30 students; Washington later had the students make the bricks and put up the campus buildings themselves.
Q 20The Tuskegee Airmen's escort fighters earned a nickname from which part being painted red?
Tails
Tails: the 332nd Fighter Group painted them red so that its fighters stood out from other escort groups in the big formations, and the pilots became the Red Tails.
Dothan sits at the heart of one of the world's biggest peanut-growing regions and celebrates the harvest each autumn with the National Peanut Festival, first held in 1938.
Q 24Enterprise, Alabama, put up a monument in 1919 to thank which crop-destroying insect?
The boll weevil
The boll weevil wiped out the cotton and pushed farmers into peanuts, which paid so well that the grateful town put up a statue to the pest that had forced the change.
Q 25Birmingham's giant Vulcan, its city symbol, holds which world record?
Largest cast iron statue
Largest cast iron statue in the world, the 56-foot Vulcan was cast from local iron for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair as an advertisement for Birmingham's young iron industry.
Q 26Birmingham boomed so quickly after its founding in 1871 that it earned which nickname?
The Magic City
The Magic City seemed to spring up overnight because iron ore, coal and limestone, the three raw materials of steel, all lay close at hand.
Q 27Which carmaker opened Alabama's first auto plant near Vance in 1997?
Mercedes
Mercedes opened its Vance plant in 1997, building the ML320 SUV; Honda followed in Lincoln in 2001 and Hyundai in Montgomery in 2005.
Q 28Talladega Superspeedway holds what distinction on the NASCAR calendar?
Longest oval
Longest oval on the NASCAR schedule at 2.66 miles, Talladega is so fast that after Bobby Allison's car flew into the catch fence in 1987, NASCAR fitted restrictor plates to slow the cars.
Q 29Which Alabama football coach won six national championships between 1961 and 1979?
Bear Bryant
Bear Bryant earned his nickname as a teenager, when he took up a showman's offer of a dollar a minute to wrestle a bear.
Q 30The Alabama-Auburn football rivalry is better known by what name?
The Iron Bowl
The Iron Bowl takes its name from Birmingham's iron industry; the game was played at the city's Legion Field every year from 1948 to 1988.