[3] Grant Parish is part of the Alexandria, LA Metropolitan Statistical Area and Red River Valley.

From 1940 to 1960, the parish had a dramatic population loss, as many African Americans from the plantation areas left in the Great Migration to seek better opportunities in the North and West.

Calhoun also published the former National Democrat newspaper in what became Colfax, designated as the seat of government of the new parish.

[4] Grant was one of several new parishes created by the Reconstruction legislature in an attempt to build the Republican Party in the state.

It was one of several areas along the Red River that had considerable violence during Reconstruction, as whites tried to maintain social control.

The gubernatorial election of 1872 was disputed in the state, and both the Democrats and Republicans certified their slates of local officers.

The election was finally settled in favor of the Republican candidates, but the decision was disputed in certain areas.

Amid widespread rumors, whites organized a militia and advanced on the courthouse on Easter Sunday, 1873.

The white militia was led by Christopher Columbus Nash, a Confederate officer who had been a prisoner of war at Johnson's Island in Ohio.

The White League's organized violence in support of the Democratic Party included widespread intimidation of black voters.

Soon after, they effectively disfranchised most blacks, a situation that persisted until after federal enforcement of Civil Rights-era legislation of the mid-1960s.

In December 2016, a courthouse nativity scene in Colfax drew a complaint from the New Orleans chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

In a letter to the Grant Parish Police Jury, the ACLU said that officials must include secular symbols of the Christmas holiday if a nativity scene is placed alone on public property.

District Attorney Jay Lemoine objected to the ACLU challenge in a statement to Alexandria Town Talk: "There have been various holiday displays presented both inside and outside the courthouse over many years.

[21] In 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush carried Grant Parish but was unsuccessful in his bid for reelection.

[23] The last Democrat to win in Grant Parish at the presidential level was former Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia in his 1976 defeat of U.S. President Gerald R. Ford, Jr., who had Bob Dole as his vice-presidential partner.