In 2010 the Mississippi Public Service Commission approved construction of the Kemper Project, designed to use "clean coal" to produce electricity for 23 counties in the eastern part of the state.

[5] Land in the area was developed in the 19th century by white planters for cotton cultivation using enslaved African Americans.

After the American Civil War and Reconstruction, racial violence increased as whites struggled to regain power over the majority population of freedmen and to suppress their voting.

[6] This form of racial terrorism was at its height in the decades around the turn of the 20th century,[6] which followed the state's disenfranchisement of most blacks in 1890 through creating barriers to voter registration.

In 1877 the Chisolm Massacre occurred, the murder by a mob of a judge, his children, and two of their friends while they were in protective custody in jail.

Sometimes the planters had grocery stores on their property and required the sharecroppers to buy all their goods there, adding to their debt.

[8][9] The events started with a physical confrontation between a conductor and an African-American man on a Mobile & Ohio Railroad train.

[8] As reported by The New York Times, Not satisfied with the punishment of this man, the whites immediately set out to strike terror into the negroes, who had been getting defiant of late.

"All the men killed at Scooba today are said to be innocent of any crime, having been shot down merely as a matter of revenge by the rough whites.

He left a force of 20 there commanded by Adjutant General Fridge and returned to the state capital on the evening of December 27.

That day the body of another murdered African-American man was found in the woods, bringing the total killed in Scooba to six.

[9] In 1934, three African-American suspects in Kemper County were repeatedly whipped in order to force them to confess to murder.

In Brown v. Mississippi (1936), the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled such forced confessions violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and were inadmissible at trial.

This was also the period of the second wave of the Great Migration, when 5 million African Americans moved out of the South to the North and especially to the West Coast, where the defense industry had many jobs, beginning during World War II.

Kemper County is within the service area of the East Mississippi Community College system.

Kemper County generally votes for candidates of the Democratic Party; the Republican presidential nominee has won it only four times in the past century.