These plantations were developed primarily in the southernmost reaches of the county, in the lowlands along the banks of the Tombigbee River and stretching over a small prairie-like area.

The rest of the county was settled by yeomen farmers who held few slaves; it was topographically unsuited for plantation-scale farming operations.

[citation needed] During the American Civil War, the first courthouse in Carrollton was burned on April 5, 1865, by troops of Union General John T. Croxton.

Though arson was suspected, no arrest was made until January 1878, after white Democrats had regained control of the state legislature and the county sheriff's office.

White racial hostility toward African Americans in the county, and their efforts to retain dominance, resulted in numerous lynchings.

Henry Wells, an African American, was arrested in January 1878 as a suspect in the courthouse arson and a burglary.

A myth associated his death with another lynching of an African-American man in this period, and an image, purportedly of Wells' face in a courthouse window.

But Jones supported reform, opposing the convict lease system that trapped so many African Americans in near-slavery conditions.

[5] Electoral unrest and populist furor in the county may have contributed to six lynchings in Carrollton in the fall of 1893.

[7][6] On August 28, 1907, African-American John Gibson was lynched in Carrollton, hanged to death in the courthouse square.

[8] John Lipsep was hanged and shot in early September 1907, a suspect in an attack on a white woman.

[9] From 1940 to 1970, many African Americans left Pickens County to escape racial violence and oppression in the Great Migration to urban areas, as did other rural residents, because of lack of economic opportunity.

Moments later, that same supercell thunderstorm produced an F5 tornado that struck northeastern Tuscaloosa near the Black Warrior River before entering western Jefferson County where it destroyed Oak Grove High School and killed thirty-two people in its path.

Worsley was arrested after stopping at a gas station when Abramo allegedly heard loud music and "observed a black male get out of the passenger side vehicle".

In 2020, Mr. Worsley was extradited from his home state in Arizona to Pickens County, where he was sentenced by a judge to 60 months in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections.