Editing Pemiscot County, Missouri (section)

==History==
Bordering the river and its floodplain, the county was devoted to agricultural development and commodity crops. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the major commodity crop was cotton, which was worked at the beginning mainly by enslaved African Americans.

After the Reconstruction era, four African Americans were [[Lynchings in the United States|lynched]] in the area, all during the early 1900s and in the county seat.<ref name="genweb">[http://cousin-collector.com/projects/index.php/saline-county/history/1754-lynching-in-missouri "Lynching in Missouri"], Saline County, Missouri/GenWeb Project</ref> This was a period of disfranchisement for  Americans, and included heightened violence against them by racist mobs.<ref name="lynching">[https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf ''Lynching in America''/ ''Supplement: Lynchings by County, 3rd edition''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20171023063004/https://eji.org/sites/default/files/lynching-in-america-third-edition-summary.pdf |date=October 23, 2017 }}, Montgomery, Alabama: Equal Justice Initiative, 2015, p. 7</ref>

To escape such this mistreatment, many African Americans left the county in the [[Great Migration (African American)|Great Migration]], moving to big cities to seek employment. Also, with the mechanization of agriculture requiring fewer laborers, the county's population has continually declined since its peak in 1940.