Featured Image: Caroline Flint/Modern South
At the center of Canton, Mississippi, the stately Madison County Courthouse stands as the jewel crowning the charming town square that has long served as the town’s gathering place. If these streets could talk, they’d tell tales of welcoming soldiers home, celebrations and markets, Hollywood productions, and some truly consequential moments in history.
But for many longtime residents, those stories live safely in their memories and not just in history books.
“There’s so much rich history,” says Mamie Chinn, a longtime Canton resident and former judge. But she notes that there’s a lot of learning to still be done outside of textbooks. “Talk to people that really were involved. Get the firsthand experience while it’s here, while we are existing.”
That firsthand history is especially powerful in Canton’s place in the Civil Rights Movement – a period of time not too long ago.
The Canton Freedom House served as an important headquarters for the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, during the fight for voting rights and racial equality. Glen Cotton, who has worked to preserve the house as a museum, says organizer George Raymond struggled to find anyone willing to provide space for a voter registration office. Each time property owners discovered how the building would be used, they backed out. Cotton’s grandparents finally agreed to open their property to the movement despite pressure from local officials to reconsider.
But it was not without consequence – Cotton recalls vendors being pressured to stop supplying his grandparents’ grocery store, and members of the community stepped in to help them keep the business running.
The Freedom House would soon become a gathering place for some of the Civil Rights Movement’s best-known leaders.
“Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine – all these people met in this house and went in and out the doors of this house,” Cotton says.
Billy Joe Wells remembers those years from another perspective: as a child growing up in Canton.
His mother did not want him participating in the demonstrations, but Wells and his siblings went anyway. He remembers guardsmen positioned around the area, tear gas being thrown as marchers gathered and one extraordinary moment that has stayed with him ever since.
“I was standing right beside Martin Luther King,” Wells says. “I marched with him up this street.”
During one march, Mamie Chinn recalls a white woman driving up, getting out of her car and knocking her hat from her head while a nearby police officer did nothing.
“Even to picket was dangerous to be out there marching,” she says.
The difference between the Canton of Chinn’s youth and the city she knows now can be shown clearly by this very interview.
“When I was very young, I would have had to go to the back door to come into this building,” she says. “Now we’re sitting here, black and white, and my car is parked at the front door, and I walk through that front door uninhibited.”
She is quick to note that progress should not erase the struggle that made it possible.
“We fought hard to get where we are today,” Chinn says. “We fought hard for me to sit here and talk with you.”
When Cotton considered demolishing the vacant Freedom House years later, former Civil Rights volunteers urged him not to.
“They said, ‘No, you can’t tear it down. You got to preserve this house. You know, it’s a lot of history here,’” Cotton recalls. He ultimately transformed the building into a museum filled with photographs, artifacts and stories from people who participated in the movement.
“Behind every picture there is a story,” he says.
Sister Thea Bowman was an educator, missionary disciple and nationally recognized advocate who called Canton home.
“She was an evangelist. She was electric. She was a motivator. She was a teacher and a songwriter,” Wells says. “I call her angel. She had the spirit of an angel, and she met no strangers.”
Before her death from cancer, Bowman summarized a message that defined much of her life’s work: “We unite ourselves with Christ’s redemptive work when we reconcile, when we make peace … when we reflect to our brothers and sisters God’s healing, God’s forgiveness, God’s unconditional love.”
Her legacy now stretches far beyond Mississippi, with schools, educational foundations, housing and health organizations bearing her name.
Alice Scott, who served as mayor from 1994 to 2002, recalls encountering people in city government who said they could not work for a Black woman.
“When one door closed, another door opened,” Scott says. “All we were doing is making steps forward.”
Those same historic streets would go on to attract attention in the form of the big screen. Canton today is known as the Movie Capital of Mississippi.
When A Time to Kill prepared to film in Canton, some residents feared scenes depicting the Ku Klux Klan could inflame racial tensions. But Scott believed the community could handle it, so she met with ministers and other local leaders before filming began.
“People were leery because they thought that would start a riot,” Scott recalls. “And I said, I think we can handle it.” The production went forward without incident.
More productions followed, including My Dog Skip and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, drawing cinephiles from all over to walk the streets they’ve come to know on the big screen.
For Wells, the films “put Canton on the map.”
And when they come to see their favorite filming locations, Wells helps visitors discover the real-life stories from the community he has known all his life. “I start telling them about this little small town,” he says, including “the history of Canton … where we’ve come from and what we’re trying to pull together in Canton now.”
Chinn echoes.
“There’s so much wonderful history here in Canton that we need to pass on to our young people accurately,” she says, “not sterilized or cleaned up, but accurately.”
And so does Scott:
“Just remember the legacy of Canton and what we did, what was done, what is still being done and what it’s going to do,” she says. “Just remember the history of Canton. Keep up with it and don’t forget it. It’s important.”
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| This article is presented in partnership with Canton Tourism, a Modern South Founding Partner.
