[2] Its name is in honor of United States Secretary of the Treasury Alexander J. Dallas, who served from 1814 to 1816.

The name referred to its fertile soil, and the area was largely developed for cotton plantations, worked by numerous enslaved African Americans in the antebellum period.

After emancipation following the Civil War, many of the African Americans stayed in the area and worked as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

[4] Shortly before the war, Smith had bought a West African girl, Redoshi, one of an illegal shipment of slaves in 1860.

She was from Benin, kidnapped at age 12 and one of numerous African captives transported on the Clotilda to Mobile, Alabama, more than 50 years after the slave trade had been abolished.

Other towns and communities in the still mostly rural county include Marion Junction, Sardis, Orrville, Valley Grande, and Minter.

[6] The lynching mobs killed suspects of alleged crimes, but also for behavior that offended a white man, and for labor organizing.

[7][6] In the early and mid-20th century, a total of 6.5 million blacks left the South in the Great Migration to escape these oppressive conditions.

In the postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans, including many veterans, mounted new efforts across the South to be able to exercise their constitutional right as citizens to register and vote.

It was organized by locals of the Dallas County Voters League (DCVL), and joined by activists from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

In August of that year, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Millions of African-American citizens across the South have registered and voted in the subsequent years, participating again in the political system.

In addition, the city conducted a Community Remembrance Project, unveiling a new historic marker to memorialize the 19 African Americans who were lynched in Dallas County by whites during the late 19th and up to mid-20th century in acts of racial terrorism.

This was done in cooperation with the Equal Justice Initiative, which published a report in 2015 that documented nearly 4,000 such lynchings, as well as Selma Center for Nonviolence Truth and Reconciliation at Healing Waters Retreat Center, Selma: Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation, and the Black Belt Community Foundation.