Annie Devine, a no-nonsense Mississippi trailblazer for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, died on Aug. 22 at a hospital in Ridgeland, Miss. She was 88 and lived in nearby Canton.

Mrs. Devine, a soft-spoken woman with a ready smile, became deeply involved in the civil rights movement of the early 1960's. She helped organize voter registration drives in Canton and surrounding Madison County, where fewer than 100 of the county's estimated 10,000 black adults were registered.

At the time, blacks in the Deep South were kept from the ballot boxes by legal chicanery and worse; in Mississippi 94 percent of black adults were not registered. Thanks largely to Mrs. Devine, blacks began to show up at the county courthouse almost daily, demanding to register.

She attended the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City along with Victoria Gray-Adams and Fannie Lou Hamer. Their objective was to unseat their state's all-white delegation and be recognized as delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, of which Mrs. Devine was a founder.

After that failed, the three sought to run for the House of Representatives, but were shunned by the white party establishment and blocked from running as independents. When the new Congress was sworn in January 1965, the three women, backed by hundreds of protesters, demanded that the House deny membership to Mississippi's representatives-elect because blacks had consistently been prevented from registering and voting in the state. Their effort, called the Mississippi Challenge, failed in the short run, but led to a nationwide lobbying drive by the Mississippi Freedom Democrats and calls for Congressional investigations into voting in Mississippi. Thus, the three women's resolve fed into the groundswell that produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Annie Devine was born in Mobile, Ala., and reared in Canton. She graduated from Tougaloo Southern Christian College, now Tougaloo College, and taught in the public schools. She was an executive for a life-insurance company before she threw her energies into the civil rights struggle.

In the 1960's she also helped found the Child Development Group of Mississippi. Under its aegis she was a longtime volunteer in the Head Start program, involving parents and marshaling community support.

Mrs. Devine's husband, Andrew, died in 1973. She is survived by two daughters, Monette Watts of Harvest, Ala., and Barbara Russell of Canton; a son, Andrew, of Omaha; a brother, Garfield Heath of Detroit; 8 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

Photo: Annie Devine, shown in 1965. (Associated Press)