Developed for cotton plantations by planters from the South, this county had the highest number of enslaved African Americans in Texas before the Civil War.

In the post-Reconstruction era, whites used lynchings to assert their dominance, in addition to the state's disenfranchisement of Blacks.

From 1940 to 1970, in the second wave of the Great Migration, many Blacks moved to the West Coast to escape Jim Crow and for work in the expanding defense industry.

More whites have moved in since the late 20th century as the county's economy has developed beyond the rural, and now comprise the majority.

East Texas was the location of most of the cotton plantations in the state and, correspondingly, of most of the enslaved African Americans.

[1] In 1861, the county's voters (who were exclusively white males and mostly upper class) overwhelmingly supported secession from the United States.

Following defeat at the end of the American Civil War, the county was part of an area occupied by Federal troops under Reconstruction.

The white minority in the county bitterly resented federal authority and the constitutional amendment granting the franchise to freedmen.

Republican dominance in local offices continued in the county until 1880, but the conservative whites of the Democratic Party regained control of the state government before the official end of Reconstruction.

[1] They retained such control of the county into the 1950s, aided by the state's disenfranchisement of Blacks at the turn of the century by a variety of laws, including those to permit white primaries.

In the 1870s the county's non-agricultural sector increased when the Texas and Pacific Railway located its headquarters and shops in Marshall.

It stimulated other industry and manufacturing in the county, and also aided the transportation to market of the important cotton commodity crop.

The Texas legislature disenfranchised most Blacks in 1901 by requiring poll taxes and authorizing white primaries (after various iterations, the latter were overturned by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1944).

As the defense industry built up in major cities and on the West Coast, from 1940 to 1970, a total of more than 4.5 million Blacks migrated from the South, particularly Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, for work and to escape continuing suppression under Jim Crow laws.

They moved to the West Coast in the second wave of the Great Migration, attracted to new jobs in the expanding defense industry.