 Since the American Civil War, whites have controlled much of the economic and political power in Hale County, enforced early by violence and later by the decades of disenfranchisement of black voters and statewide imposition of Jim Crow.In the first half of the 20th century, many African Americans left the county in two waves of migration to cities and northern and western industrial centers.Beginning in the late 1960s, they recovered the ability to vote.