Clark, Jr., a teacher in Holmes County, was elected as state representative in 1967, the first black person to be elected to state government in the 20th century. Holmes had more candidates running for offices for the Freedom Democratic Party than did any other county. In 1967, eight of ten black candidates to run for local county office were landowning farmers they were the first African Americans to run for office in the county since Reconstruction. They were integral members of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. By 1960, Holmes County's 800 independent black farmers owned 50% of the land, a higher number of such farmers than elsewhere in the state. Some African Americans had reacquired land in Holmes County in the 1940s under New Deal programs. African Americans migrated from the Deep South especially to West Coast cities, where jobs were plentiful in the buildup of the defense industry. With an economy based on agriculture, the county had steep population declines from 1940 to 1970, due to mechanization of farm labor, and the second wave of the Great Migration. After the war, many freedmen acquired land in the bottomlands of the Delta by clearing and selling timber to raise the purchase price, but most lost their land during difficult financial times at the end of the century, becoming tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Planters generally developed their properties along the riverfronts. A favorite son, Edmond Favor Noel, was an attorney and state politician, elected as governor of Mississippi, serving from 1908 to 1912.Ĭotton was long the commodity crop before the Civil War, its cultivation was based on slave labor and the majority of the population consisted of enslaved African Americans.
The county is named in honor of David Holmes, territorial governor and the first governor of the state of Mississippi and later United States Senator for Mississippi. As of the 2010 census, the population was 19,198.
The western part of the county is within the Yazoo- Mississippi Delta. state of Mississippi its western border is formed by the Yazoo River and the eastern border by the Big Black River.
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