March Against Fear

Canton did not meet the marchers cold. Three years of organizing by COFO and CORE had produced roughly 1,000 attempts to register in eight months, with about 30 accepted, and a 1964 boycott of 21 stores. C.O. Chinn lent his store for meetings, and Annie Devine, a teacher and insurance saleswoman, moved easily through Black and white Canton. When city officials refused the marchers a camp at a Black public school, the crowd pitched tents anyway, and state troopers gassed and beat them. Stokely Carmichael led the crowd that night.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Natchez Trace Parkway at Ridgeland — 14 mi
  The stretch of the Natchez Trace around Ridgeland, where a worn section of the Old Trace, the Ross Barnett Reservoir and the Choctaw town of Chisha Foka share a few miles of parkway.
• Tougaloo College — 16 mi
  A historically Black college north of Jackson, founded on a former plantation in 1869, whose students staged Mississippi's first sit-in and whose chapel hosted the movement's leaders.
• Blue Front Cafe — 19 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument — 22 mi
  A modest ranch house in Jackson's Elraine neighborhood where Medgar Evers was shot in the driveway in 1963, now a unit of the National Park Service.

More markers nearby

• Hickory Street — 0.4 mi
• Madison County Courthouse — 0.6 mi
• Grace Church — 0.7 mi
• Achilles "Killis" Walton House — 0.8 mi