The county was named after Joseph M. Wilcox, a United States Army lieutenant who was killed in Alabama during the Creek War.

[4] As of the 2020 United States census, there were 10,600 people, 3,854 households, and 2,284 families residing in the county.

The only Republican to carry the county since 1900 has been Barry Goldwater in 1964 – when little to none of the county's black majority had voted for over seven decades and opposition by the voting white minority to Civil Rights meant that national Democrat Lyndon Johnson was not allowed on the ballot.

Even after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, black registration was so slow that segregationist George Wallace comfortably carried the county in 1968, but since then the Democratic presidential candidate has carried Wilcox in every election.

It was one of only six Wallace counties[a] to vote for George McGovern against Richard Nixon's 3,000-plus-county landslide of 1972.

Major industries in the county include a paper mill operated by International Paper, based in Memphis, Tennessee, on the Alabama River near Pine Hill that employs roughly 400 people, and a copper tubing plant owned by Golden Dragon Copper Group of Xinxiang, China in Sunny South that opened in 2014; it employs approximately 300.

[19][20][21] Wilcox County is home to Roland Cooper State Park, Lake Dannelly, and Bridgeport Beach.