 In the post-Reconstruction era, whites struggled to re-establish white supremacy, by violence and intimidation of black Republican voters in this area and throughout the South.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, most in the decades near the turn of the 20th century.