[3] The county was named after the Marquis de la Fayette, French hero of the American Revolution.

[4] A part of the Memphis, TN-MS-AR Metropolitan Statistical Area, Fayette County is culturally alike to the Mississippi Delta and was a major area of cotton plantations dependent on slave labor in the nineteenth century.

Following the emancipation of slaves on plantations, many of Fayette County's African-American residents worked as sharecroppers.

In recent years, Fayette County has been transitioning from a rural area to accommodate the suburban sprawl from Memphis.

Since the four-lane expansion of Highway 64 in the early 1990s, western Fayette County has had a population explosion.

Some of these families have been farming for generations dating back to plantations before the Civil War.

Others are younger farmers who have used their skill, business savvy, and work ethic to develop large farming operations.

[citation needed] Fayette County has become a destination for people of the Memphis metro area.

The total value for building permits in June 2007 was close to that of the much larger Memphis suburban area of DeSoto County, Mississippi.

[citation needed] As of the 2020 United States census, there were 41,990 people, 15,596 households, and 11,567 families residing in the county.

According to the census of 2000, the largest ancestry groups in Fayette County were English 51.66%, African 35.95%, Scots-Irish 7.1%, and Scottish 1.2%.

From the end of Reconstruction until Harry S. Truman's civil rights proposals during the 1940s, Democrats won over 85 percent of Fayette County's vote even in 1920 and 1928 when Warren G. Harding and Herbert Hoover carried the state's electoral votes.