[3] Holmes County native, Edmond Favor Noel, was an attorney and state politician, elected as governor of Mississippi, serving from 1908 to 1912.

Cotton was long the commodity crop; before the Civil War, its cultivation was based on slave labor and the majority of the population consisted of enslaved African Americans.

[5] With an economy based on agriculture, the county had steep population declines from 1940 to 1970, due to mechanization of farm labor, and the second wave of the Great Migration.

African Americans migrated from the Deep South especially to West Coast cities, where jobs were plentiful in the buildup of the defense industry.

The county was developed for cotton plantations in the antebellum era before the American Civil War, with most properties of the period located along the riverfronts for transportation access.

"[8] After the war, many freedmen and white migrants went to Holmes County and other parts of the Mississippi Delta, where they developed the bottomlands behind the riverfront properties, clearing and selling timber in order to buy their own lands.

Effectively African-Americans were disenfranchised by the new constitution of 1890; the loss of political power added to their economic problems associated with the financial Panic of 1893.

They worked hard to leave field labor and often became merchants, especially becoming grocers of small stores in the rural Delta towns.

They were fiercely independent and later were among strong supporters of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, even as white people kept a grip on economic and political power through banks, police and the county courthouse.

[16] The USDA Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) (established under another name in the 1930s) carried out its programs on a county-wide level.

Although African-Americans made up a large portion of landowners in Holmes County, they were disenfranchised from voting and excluded from participating on the board.

Beginning in the World War II period, the population of Holmes County declined markedly from its peak of 1940; through 1970 thousands left, with most African-Americans going to the West Coast, Midwestern and Northeastern cities in the second wave of the Great Migration, taking jobs in the booming defense industry.

[15] Holmes County became the site of renewed organizing of grassroots efforts for African-American civil rights, with people designated as responsible for its Beats and precincts.

[17] In 1954, the White Citizens Council was established to expressly to oppose desegregation of public schools after the United States Supreme Court ruling that year in Brown v. Board of Education, finding segregation to be unconstitutional.

They raised funds to support whites-only schools, and conducted economic boycotts of blacks suspected of civil rights activism, as well as social and political pressure against whites who crossed them.

For instance, where white Democratic Party officials had defined the very large Lexington precinct, which held the majority of population, the county chapter of the FDP organized its own sub-precincts within it in order to communicate better with the community.

As resistance continued by white officials, in November 1965 a federal registrar was assigned to Holmes County, based on residents' petitions about the circuit clerk's discrimination over a 4-month period.

[18] But discrimination in USDA programs continued and was widespread, as shown by a late 20th-century national class-action suit, Pigford v. Glickman, which was settled in 1999.

The FDP continued to work with other communities on correcting unfair hiring at factories and unequal administration of welfare, as well as trying to end discrimination at eating places.

In 1967 black farmers and landowners, who had been part of the Movement since the early 1960s, accounted for eight of the ten candidates who ran for local and state offices: Thomas C. "Top Cat" Johnson,[22] Ed Noel McGaw, Jr.; Ward Montgomery; John Malone; Willie James Burns; John Daniel Wesley; Griffin McLaurin, and Ralthus Hayes.

Clark was a member of a landowning family in Ebenezer; he had a master's degree and had nearly finished his PhD from Michigan State University.

Although he moved to Washington, DC, where he was partner in a prominent black law firm, Howard was elected as Republican National Committeeman from Mississippi in 1924.

He was appointed in 1923 to a national position in the Office of the Attorney General in the administration of Warren G. Harding, retaining it until resigning under President Herbert Hoover in 1928.

Conducting fund raising outside the state, she promoted a strong academic education with Christian discipline, and her school was nationally known.

During the period of integration of public schools in Mississippi in the late 1960s, many white parents in the majority-black Delta enrolled their children in newly established private segregation academies, as they did in Holmes County.

It was established in 1959 as the weekly paper of the county chapter of the White Citizens Council, founded to resist integration of public schools and the civil rights movement.

Brannon Smith was eventually forced out of the business by white boycotts of her newspapers and the firebombing of one paper in Jackson, Mississippi.

The Herald published the names of African Americans who took action for civil rights in order to bring economic and political pressure against them.

For instance, in April 1963 it published interviews and the names of 14 blacks who attempted to register to vote at the county courthouse in Lexington.

Carolyn Haines, an American mystery writer, sets many of her novels in Holmes County and other parts of the Mississippi Delta.