 In the post-Reconstruction era, whites directed considerable violence against African Americans, in an effort to restore and maintain white supremacy after Democrats regained power.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 18 lynchings of African Americans from 1877 to 1950, most in the decades near the turn of the 20th century.