Alabama State Coat of Arms

The coat of arms appears in official state buildings, above legislative desks, and in public schools across Alabama. It is a separate emblem from the state seal. The seal centers on a map of Alabama's rivers, while the coat of arms uses a shield to show which governments held power over Alabama through history.

Two bald eagles stand on either side of the shield. Above it is a crest shaped like a sailing ship. Below is the state motto in Latin. The Legislature adopted the design on March 14, 1939, and it has not changed since.

The Alabama coat of arms began with Marie Bankhead Owen, Director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History. In 1923, she contacted B. J. Tieman, a heraldry expert in New York, and asked him to design a coat of arms for the state. Tieman produced a sketch showing a quartered shield with the flags of five governments, supported by eagles and topped with a ship.

Owen then selected an English motto from a poem by Sir William Jones, an eighteenth-century English scholar. The line she chose — about men who dare to defend their rights — was translated into Latin by Professor W. B. Saffold of the University of Alabama. The Latin phrase became Audemus jura nostra defendere.

Artist Naomi Rabb Winston, who had studied painting at the Corcoran Gallery School of Art in Washington, D.C., was hired to paint the completed design in oils. She also worked with heraldry experts at the Library of Congress to write the formal heraldic description that was later included in the legislation. One detail in the design is historically imprecise: the Union Jack shown for Great Britain is the 1801 version, adopted after Alabama had already left British control.

The design sat without official status for sixteen years. It was Juliet Perry Dixon, wife of Governor Frank Dixon, who pushed for the Legislature to act. State representative James Simpson of Jefferson County introduced the bill in 1939. Both houses passed it without a single dissenting vote on March 14, 1939.

The Alabama coat of arms is built around a quartered shield supported by two eagles, with a ship above and a motto scroll below. Each part of the design has a specific historical reference.

The coat of arms treats Alabama's history as a sequence of governments, each one leaving its mark on the land. By placing all five flags on the same shield, the design does not hide the fact that France, Spain, Great Britain, and the Confederacy all held power over Alabama before the United States. The United States shield at the center shows where that sequence ended.

The ship Badine at the top anchors the timeline at its earliest point — French colonial exploration in 1699. The motto below closes it with a statement of present identity: a state that will defend its own rights.

Alabama did not use an officially adopted coat of arms before 1939. What survives from earlier years are historical renderings and design-stage images rather than separate legal state coats of arms.

Wikimedia Commons preserves two useful pre-adoption renderings: a decorative 1876 print and a newspaper rendering published in 1899. Both show the same broad heraldic program later formalized in 1939, but neither had official legal status.