Birmingham, Alabama Trivia
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45 free Birmingham, Alabama trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
40 free Birmingham, Alabama trivia questions with answers. Birmingham trivia for Alabama's Magic City - the Birmingham founded in 1871 and named for the English one. The quiz covers why the city exists at all (the only place on Earth with iron ore, coal and limestone side by side), the Vulcan statue that won a prize in St. Louis before it ever stood on Red Mountain, Sloss Furnaces, the oldest ballpark in America and the Black Barons who played there, and the 1963 campaign - Bull Connor's hoses, the Children's Crusade, the Letter from Birmingham Jail and the four girls killed at 16th Street Baptist Church - that pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress. There are questions on modern Birmingham too: UAB as the biggest employer, the Fortune 500 companies still headquartered downtown, the 2022 World Games, the museum that is the largest in the Southeast and the 2020 census that handed the state's biggest-city title to Huntsville. Easy questions any local will get open the set; the later ones will test a Jones Valley historian. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its citation.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Birmingham, Alabama, was founded in 1871 by which developer?
Elyton Land
The Elyton Land Company, backed by bankers and other investors, laid out Birmingham where two rail lines crossed; the city later annexed the older town of Elyton itself.
Q 02Birmingham claims the 1947 celebration Raymond Weeks led as the first of which US holiday?
Veterans Day
Veterans Day. Weeks took his idea to General Eisenhower, and in 1954 Congress renamed Armistice Day to honour veterans of all wars.
Q 03Which nickname did Birmingham earn from its explosive growth after its 1871 founding?
The Magic City
The Magic City. The boom drew many Black workers from rural Alabama into the city's mines and mills.
Q 04Which three steelmaking raw materials lie close together in the Birmingham District?
Ore, coal and limestone
Ore, coal and limestone. The founders planned an industrial city beside them and named it after Birmingham, England's centre of iron and steel.
Q 05Birmingham is the seat of which Alabama county?
Jefferson
Jefferson. The county's 2011 bankruptcy, then the largest by a US local government, followed billions in sewer debt run up through bond deals tainted by bribes.
Q 06Which city overtook Birmingham as Alabama's largest after the 2020 census?
Huntsville
Huntsville. It passed Birmingham in the 2020 census, yet Birmingham's metro area remained more than twice the size of Huntsville's.
Q 07Which institution was the Birmingham metro area's largest employer in 2024?
The University of Alabama at Birmingham
The University of Alabama at Birmingham, the area's biggest employer, led the medical research that remade an economy once built on steel.
Q 08Which US Secretary of State was born in Birmingham in 1954?
Condoleezza Rice
Condoleezza Rice. At eight she lost a childhood friend, Denise McNair, in the 1963 church bombing, which she heard from her father's church a few blocks away.
Q 09The Vulcan statue on the ridge south of downtown is the world's largest statue made of what?
Cast iron
Cast iron. Vulcan was cast in Birmingham entirely from local iron, a giant advertisement for the city's iron industry.
Q 10Birmingham's Vulcan was made for which event, where it won a Grand Prize?
The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair
The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Back home, workers bolted an arm on wrong at the state fairgrounds, where Vulcan spent decades advertising products like Coca-Cola.
Q 11When did the neon torch Vulcan held from 1946 to 1999 glow red?
After a traffic fatality in the city
After a traffic fatality in the city. The Jaycees made Vulcan a road-safety beacon, green on days without a traffic death, until the 2004 restoration returned his spear.
Q 12Which suburb is the butt of the long-running joke about the view of Vulcan's bare backside?
Homewood
Homewood. Residents joke that Vulcan is flashing them from on high, and a radio host wrote a novelty song about it called 'Moon Over Homewood'.
Q 13Which federal designation did Birmingham's closed Sloss Furnaces receive?
National Historic Landmark
Q 21Birmingham's 1963 church bombing came less than three weeks after which event?
The March on Washington
The March on Washington. Eighteen days after King's 'I Have a Dream' speech, Klansmen bombed the church on a Sunday, killing four girls.
Q 22Which Klansman, nicknamed 'Dynamite Bob', was convicted in 1977 for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing?
Robert Chambliss
Robert Chambliss. Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the cold case in 1971 and, in 1977, won the conviction that sent Chambliss to prison for life.
Q 23Which filmmaker made the documentary '4 Little Girls' about the church bombing?
Spike Lee
National Historic Landmark. Local citizens lobbied to save the furnaces after they closed, and the site became a museum of industry.
Q 14Rickwood Field, which opened on 18 August 1910, holds what distinction?
Oldest professional ballpark in the US
Rickwood Field is the oldest professional ballpark in the US, and its period look has made it a set for baseball films such as '42' and 'Cobb'.
Q 15Which baseball legend played for the Birmingham Black Barons at Rickwood Field as a teenager in 1948?
Willie Mays
Willie Mays. He was still in high school, so the big-league scouts who wanted him had to wait until he graduated before they could sign him.
Q 16Which two teams played MLB's first regular-season game in Alabama, at Rickwood Field in June 2024?
Cardinals and Giants
Cardinals and Giants. Both wore Negro Leagues throwback uniforms, and 99-year-old Bill Greason, a former Black Barons pitcher, threw out the first pitch.
Q 17Which local minister invited Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC to Birmingham for the 1963 campaign?
Fred Shuttlesworth
Fred Shuttlesworth. A 1956 bomb destroyed his parsonage, yet he walked out unharmed and kept leading Birmingham's movement until he brought King in.
Q 18Where did Martin Luther King Jr. write his famous Birmingham letter?
In a cell after his Good Friday arrest
King wrote the letter in his cell in the Birmingham jail after his Good Friday arrest on 12 April 1963, answering eight white clergymen who had called the protests unwise and untimely.
Q 19During Birmingham's May 1963 Children's Crusade, what did Bull Connor's men turn on young marchers?
Fire hoses and police dogs
Fire hoses and police dogs. Connor turned to force on 3 May to stop the stream of children marching from the church toward downtown.
Q 20By 10 May 1963 Birmingham's business leaders agreed to desegregate what?
Lunch counters, restrooms and fitting rooms
Lunch counters, restrooms and fitting rooms. Stores also pledged to hire Black clerks, and the Kennedy administration went on to propose what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Spike Lee. He earned the families' trust, and they talked to him on camera about the girls they lost.
Q 24Which green space beside 16th Street Baptist Church was the staging ground for the 1963 marches?
Kelly Ingram Park
Kelly Ingram Park. In 1992 it was redesigned as 'A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation', filled with memorial sculptures of the movement.
Q 25Who became Birmingham's first African American mayor in 1979?
Richard Arrington Jr.
Richard Arrington Jr. The former college professor served five terms, and in 1992 he chose Johnnie Johnson as the city's first Black police chief.
Q 26Downtown Birmingham lies in which long valley, flanked by parallel ridges?
Jones Valley
Jones Valley. After the Civil War, new rail lines through the valley and rich minerals nearby paved the way for founding a new city there.
Q 27Which international multi-sport event did Birmingham, Alabama, host in July 2022?
The World Games
The World Games. Birmingham was chosen in 2015 to host the 2021 edition, and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the games back a year to July 2022.
Q 28Birmingham's four-skyscraper downtown intersection earned what nickname?
Heaviest Corner on Earth
Heaviest Corner on Earth. The boast grew out of a 1911 magazine article on the last of the four big buildings at the corner.
Q 29Which Birmingham company renamed itself in 1927 after its best-selling product, a ginger ale?
Buffalo Rock
Buffalo Rock. It began in 1901 as the Alabama Grocery Company and added Buffalo Rock Ginger Ale in 1906; the drink sold well enough to rename the firm.
Q 30Which two Birmingham-based companies are major iron-pipe manufacturers?
ACIPCO and McWane
ACIPCO and McWane both make ductile-iron pipe; ACIPCO's founder, John Eagan, willed the company in trust to its employees when he died in 1924.