[4] According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 0.6 square miles (1.6 km2), all land.

The heavily wooded swamp along the Tallahatchie River was historically part of the Choctaw Nation, one of the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeast.

The bottomland was covered by trees, vines, and underbrush when the pioneers started clearing the land for agriculture.

Their work on cotton plantations produced the commodity crop that was the basis of the economy for decades.

In 1902 the county was divided into two districts, on either side of the Tallahatchie River, which was a barrier to cross-county transportation.

Charleston was the original county seat, located east of the river in the first area of European-American settlement.

Milam and Roy Bryant, charged in the lynching and murder of Emmett Till that year in adjoining Leflore County.

(His beaten and mutilated body was found on the bank of the river in Tallahatchie County, so the trial was held here.)

The two men were acquitted by an all-male, all-white jury of the murder of Till, a teenage African-American boy from Chicago.

He became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and a symbol of the violent persecution suffered by blacks in the South.

[citation needed] In 1990, the courthouse was designated as a state landmark by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

In addition, it undertook to restore the Sumner County Courthouse and adapt it as the site of an interpretive center to commemorate Emmett Till.

Many moved to California and the West Coast during World War II and after, attracted by jobs in the buildup of the defense industries and seeking to escape southern oppression and violence.