Located in the fertile Black Belt region, Hayneville was the county seat in a plantation economy after Native Americans were removed that used slave labor for cotton production.

Hayneville was founded in 1820 by settlers from the Edgefield, Abbeville, and Colleton districts of South Carolina on property purchased from the U.S. Land Office at Cahawba.

The indigenous Muscogee Creek people had been forced to cede their lands under various treaties with the United States, and most of them were removed to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River.

During the early part of the 20th century, the boll weevil invaded the South, destroying cotton crops across the most productive counties.

Civil rights activists worked in Hayneville and Lowndes to organize residents in preparation for registration and voting.

On August 13, 1965, Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian from New Hampshire, worked with a group of 29 civil rights protesters to picket whites-only stores in the small town of Fort Deposit.

There, they encountered Tom L. Coleman, an engineer for the state highway department and unpaid special county deputy wielding a shotgun.

Daniels pushed Sales to the ground and caught the full blast of the gun, which killed him instantly.

In June 1965, Gregory Orr, a student from upstate New York who traveled to Mississippi to take part in civil rights protests, was driving home from the capital of Jackson.

While driving through Lowndes County, he was stopped by white vigilantes, kidnapped and held without charges for eight days in the Hayneville courthouse jail.

Civil rights activities in Lowndes continued in the county under the leadership of Stokeley Carmichael, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and local residents, to educate and register blacks to vote after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Only one person filed for a statement of candidacy and was nominated for the office of Mayor and five places on the town council.

The racial makeup of the town was 85.47% Black or African American, 13.42% White, 0.17% Asian, and 0.93% from two or more races.