Amite County was established in February 1809 from the eastern portion of
Wilkinson County. It was named after the
Amite River. French explorers had named the latter for the friendly (
amitié in French) indigenous
Houma people they encountered in the region. The legislation that established the county authorized the appointment of five commissioners to find a site for the county seat, near the county's center and near a good spring; its name was to be Liberty. At this time, the total population of the county numbered about 4000 people, about 80% of whom were middle-class families of seventeenth-century Virginia stock who had gradually migrated through other frontier states. Primary religious groups were all Protestant, including
Baptists,
Presbyterians, and
Methodists. Completed in 1840, the courthouse in Liberty is the oldest courthouse in Mississippi in continuous use. As part of that raid, Union forces pillaged many homes and plantations. Most of the buildings of the Amite Female Seminary, with 13 pianos, were burnt; one building was spared, the small Mary Van Norman Ratcliff Building, commonly known as the "Little Red Schoolhouse." At the end of the Civil War, Amite County's population was 60% African American. During Reconstruction,
freedmen elected several African Americans to local office as county sheriff. The county had 14 documented lynchings in the period from 1877 to 1950; most took place around the turn of the century when disenfranchisement and imposition of Jim Crow was underway. Blacks were excluded from the political process in the county and state until the late 1960s. African Americans were a majority in the state until the 1930s but excluded from voting, they were also excluded from juries and the entire political system. The county continued to be based on agriculture, with cotton the basis of the economy into the 1930s. A
boll weevil invasion damaged many cotton crops. Planters shifted to logging and dairy farming in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. As agriculture was mechanized, reducing the need for farm labor, many blacks left Amite County during the first half of the 20th century in two waves of the
Great Migration. In the first wave, before World War II, many moved north to Chicago and other industrial cities of the Midwest. In the second wave, they moved to the West Coast, where the burgeoning defense industry created jobs before, during, and after the war. From 1940 to 1960, the county population declined by 29%, as can be seen on the census tables below. Some rural whites also left the county for industrialized cities. In the 1950s, local farmer E.W. Steptoe founded a chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (
NAACP) in the county.
Herbert Lee, a married farmer with nine children, was among its charter members. They were working to regain constitutional civil rights, including the ability to vote. In the summer of 1961,
Bob Moses from the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worked in the county to organize African Americans for voter registration. He was beaten by Bill Caston, a cousin to the sheriff, near the county courthouse, and arrested. He was told to leave the county for his own safety. In the 1960s, only one African American of the total of 5,500 in Amite County was a registered voter. Even after the
Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, extensive grassroots efforts were required to register eligible voters. Danny Jones was featured as a likely perpetrator in the Allen case in a 2011 episode of
60 Minutes focusing on civil rights cold cases, but he denied an interview. He died in 2013. Following the repression of the civil rights era and a continuing poor economy, younger African Americans continued to leave the county, seeking jobs in bigger cities. The population declined more than 11 percent from 1960 to 1970, and further declines occurred to 1980 (see census tables below.) Because of the murders of Lee and Allen, voter registration efforts had stopped in the early 1960s. African Americans did not register until after passage of the
Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provided federal protection and oversight. Today the county is majority white in population. On October 20, 1977, a rental plane carrying members of the band
Lynyrd Skynyrd from
Greenville, South Carolina, to
LSU in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was low on fuel and
crashed in a swamp in Amite County. Noted historic sites listed on the
National Register of Historic Places include the Amite County Courthouse and the Westbrook Cotton Gin, the only one surviving of seven in the county. In addition, 19th-century plantation houses and the
Liberty and
Bethany Presbyterian churches are listed on the Register. ==Geography==