[3][4] The area of the Delta was developed largely for cotton as a commodity crop before the Civil War, based on the labor of enslaved African Americans.

At the turn of the century, the state legislature passed measures that effectively disenfranchised most blacks for decades.

The Equal Justice Initiative reported in 2015 that the county had 15 lynchings of African Americans from 1877 to 1950,[5] most in the decades near the turn of the 20th century.

[5] To escape the violence and oppression, thousands of African Americans left the state in the Great Migration to northern and western cities, especially after 1940.

The former comes with the caveat that Black people could not vote in the South in 1948, and the latter was the last year that white conservatives dominated county politics.

Following passage and enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, newly registered African Americans began to support Democratic Party candidates.

Most whites have shifted into the Republican Party since the 1970s, and major population loss combined with the state's hard right turn has made the county tightly close in recent elections.

Each township includes unincorporated areas; some may have incorporated cities or towns within part of their boundaries.

However, the United States census does list Arkansas population based on townships (sometimes referred to as "county subdivisions" or "minor civil divisions").

Each town or city is within one or more townships in an Arkansas county based on census maps and publications.