As of 2022, the largest industries were manufacturing, health care & social assistance, and accommodation & food services.

[5] In March of this same year, there was a mail route started in the village of Kensington that went through Howell until ending in Grand Rapids.

[8] The Ku Klux Klan first took hold in the area in the 1920s, and membership in Livingston County increased during the American civil rights era.

[12] While they are numerous in Metro Detroit, as of 2011, Howell was not listed as an active home to any hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

[13] On October 22, 1994, less than a dozen Ku Klux Klansmen from outside Howell held a rally on the steps of the historic Livingston County Courthouse.

Ben Bohnsack, the pastor of the First United Methodist Church in nearby Brighton, Michigan, at the time, described the approaching rally as an "assault on the values" of the community.

On the day of the rally, the courthouse was put under the protection of 174 police officers from every law enforcement agency in the county.

An 8-foot-tall chain-link fence was erected around the courthouse, with two additional sections raised on Grand River Avenue to contain protesters and observers.

The fence was dismantled after the rally, and on the following day, citizens assembled with brooms, mops, and buckets for a symbolic cleansing of the courthouse steps.

[14] Activities associated with the Ku Klux Klan persisted into the 2000s, with events such as a public auction of Klan items scheduled for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in January 2005,[15] the 2010 suspension of a teacher who removed students for wearing a Confederate flag and making anti-gay slurs,[16] and students' racist tweets toward a racially mixed team in 2014.

They began their demonstration on the lawn of the Livingston County courthouse, where, in 1994, members of the community symbolically scrubbed the steps following a Klan rally.

One of the photos showed them with a Donald Trump flag, while the Livingston Post uploaded a video made by a passerby in which one of the protestors is heard saying, "We love Hitler.