In 1963, CORE activists David Dennis, Matheo Suarez, and George Raymond opened an office in Canton to register black voters in Madison County, where blacks were more than seventy percent of the population but only 121 were registered to vote. Raymond and Suarez served as co-directors and were joined by Annie Devine, C.O. Chinn Sr., Anne Moody of Tougaloo College, local families including the Washingtons and Chinns, and other organizers. From headquarters in Canton, they built one of the state's most active civil rights projects, staging a boycott of twenty-one stores, creating Freedom Schools, organizing Freedom Days, supporting school desegregation efforts, and pressing mass voter registration despite police brutality, arrests, economic retaliation, threats, shootings, and a bombing. Even amid constant violence and harassment, Freedom School classes met, the Canton Community Center thrived, and voter registration work continued. In June 1966, when marchers from James Meredith's March Against Fear came through Canton, thousands of Madison Movement members gathered to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but state troopers fired tear gas and beat marchers after city officials refused to allow tents on the grounds of an African American school.