Located in the west-central section of the state, it was created from portions of Greene, Marengo, Perry, and Tuscaloosa counties.

[4][5] Hale County is connected to three major twentieth-century artists: Walker Evans photographed the area in 1936 while he collaborated with James Agee on the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

More recently, Hale County has become the home of the nationally recognized Auburn University Rural Studio, an architectural outreach program founded by architect and artist Samuel Mockbee and D. K.

[6] In 2019 the film Hale County This Morning, This Evening by artist RaMell Ross was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, poetically addressing the region's shift in demographics and the power of intra-community authorship.

Since the American Civil War, whites have controlled much of the economic and political power in Hale County, enforced early by violence and later by the decades of disenfranchisement of black voters and statewide imposition of Jim Crow.

In the first half of the 20th century, many African Americans left the county in two waves of migration to cities and northern and western industrial centers.

Many manufacturing plants closed during late 20th century restructuring, and population and businesses declined with the loss of jobs, especially in and around Greensboro (the county seat).

The Farquhar Cattle Ranch, a former Alabama Department of Corrections facility for men,[18] was in an unincorporated area of the county, about 8 miles (13 km) east of Greensboro.

On March 21, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. attended a meeting at Greensboro's St. Matthew Church, and then spent the night in this house where he sought refuge from the Ku Klux Klan.

The museum reveals the struggle for equality for African Americans in Alabama, and its founder, Theresa Burroughs, was both a family friend of King, and a foot soldier in the Civil Rights Movement.

Greensboro is also home to a large number of antebellum-era houses and churches, including some that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places such as Glencairn and Magnolia Grove.