Annie Devine (1912-2000): Canton organizer and congressional challenger

Who was Annie Devine?

Annie Devine was a schoolteacher and insurance agent in Canton, Mississippi, who became one of the most respected leaders of the Mississippi movement. She was born Annie Bell Robinson in Mobile, Alabama, in 1912, grew up in Canton and graduated from Tougaloo College. Victoria Gray Adams, who worked beside her, called her a behind-the-scenes giant, according to the SNCC Digital Gateway.

How did she join the Canton movement?

In 1963 she heard singing coming from C. O. Chinn's motel on Franklin Street, went in, and met CORE organizers George Raymond and Dave Dennis. Canton, in Madison County, was about three-quarters Black and had no registered Black voters. When police harassed her for going to meetings, she quit her job and worked for the movement full time. By late 1963 she was running the Canton office of the Congress of Racial Equality, which worked under the COFO umbrella. On February 28, 1964, she organized Canton's first Freedom Day, when residents lined up at the courthouse to protest the registrar's refusal to register Black applicants. More on Devine and Canton.

What did she do in the Freedom Democratic Party?

She helped found the MFDP in 1964, built the party around Canton and was elected to its 68-person delegation to Atlantic City. There she joined Fannie Lou Hamer and Victoria Gray in opposing the two-seat compromise. See the MFDP page.

What was her role in the 1965 challenge?

She was one of the three Freedom Democratic contestants, with Hamer and Gray, who asked the House to unseat Mississippi's congressmen. On January 4, 1965, Capitol Police kept the three women from the chamber. The SNCC Digital Gateway describes Devine as one of the first three Black women to stand on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, which happened later that year during the debate. She argued that members-elect should not be seated while Black Mississippians were denied the vote. The full story is on our page about the challenge.

What did she do afterward?

She helped found the Child Development Group of Mississippi, the Head Start program that hired local parents as teachers, and kept up voter registration work. She died on August 22, 2000. Her place in the history, beside Hamer and Gray, is a reminder that the Mississippi movement's best-known faces came from a much larger group of local women leaders.