Editing Tuscaloosa County, Alabama (section)

===Civil War and Reconstruction===
During the antebellum years, the principal crop was cotton, cultivated and processed by African-American slaves. By 1860, shortly before Alabama's [[secession]] from the Union, the county had a total of 12,971 whites, 84 "free" African Americans, and 10,145 African-American slaves; the latter comprised 43.7 percent of the total population.<ref name="pop">[http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ajac/altuscaloosa.htm Tom Blake, "MIGRATION OF FORMER SLAVES"], Tuscaloosa County, AL, February 2002, at Rootsweb</ref> The [[American Civil War|Civil War]] brought significant changes, including migration out of the county by some African Americans.<ref name="pop" /> Some [[freedmen]] moved to nearby counties and larger cities for more opportunities and to join with other freedmen in communities less subject to white supervision and intimidation.<ref name="pop" />

Several thousand men from Tuscaloosa County fought in the [[Confederate States of America|Confederate]] armies. During the last weeks of the War, a brigade of Union troops raiding the city burned the campus of the university. The town of Tuscaloosa was also damaged in the battle and shared fully in the South's economic sufferings which followed the defeat. Following Reconstruction, there was violence as whites struggled to regain control of the state legislature. It reached a height in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tuscaloosa County had a total of 10 documented [[Lynching in the United States|lynchings of African Americans]], according to a 2015 study by the [[Equal Justice Initiative]].<ref>[https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf "Supplement: Lynchings by County/ Alabama: Tuscaloosa", 3rd edition] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171023063004/https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf|date=October 23, 2017}}, from ''Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror'', 2015, Equal Justice Institute, Montgomery, Alabama</ref>

In the 1890s the construction of a system of locks and dams on the Black Warrior River by the [[U.S. Army Corps of Engineers]] improved navigation to such an extent that Tuscaloosa was effectively connected to the Gulf Coast seaport of [[Mobile, Alabama|Mobile]]. This stimulated the economy and trade, and mining and metallurgical industries were developed in the region. By the advent of the 20th century, the growth of the University of Alabama and the mental health-care facilities in the city, along with a strong national economy, fueled a steady growth in Tuscaloosa which continued unabated for 100 years.

In 1901, the state legislature passed a constitution that [[Disfranchisement after Reconstruction era|disenfranchised most African Americans]] and tens of thousands of poor whites and followed with [[Jim Crow]] laws enforcing racial segregation. Due to this oppression and problems of continued violence by [[Lynching in the United States|lynching]]s, many African Americans left Alabama in two waves of the [[Great Migration (African American)|Great Migration]] in the first half of the 20th century. They went to Northern and Midwestern industrial cities. Their mass departure from Tuscaloosa County is reflected in the lower rates of county population growth from 1910 to 1930, and from 1950 to 1970. (see Census Table).