Located above Burgland Supermarket, the McComb Masonic Temple became a center of civil rights activity in McComb. Black Masonic lodges provided safe spaces for community organizing, leadership, and solidarity among African Americans, and Eureka Lodge #5 moved into this hall around 1955 in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Burglundtown. The lower level housed a grocery store opened by a Black-owned company that allowed community members to buy stock, and Peter Lewis later took over the Burgland Supermarket when it went into debt. Because of the store's central location, much of McComb's Black community regularly passed by or shopped there. With support from local NAACP leaders including C.C. Bryant, SNCC activist Bob Moses came to McComb in 1961 to organize local people to try to register to vote. At the instruction of C.C. and Emogene Bryant, the lodge allowed Moses to use the hall for voter registration workshops, and with Webb Owens and the Bryants he also organized Sunday community meetings to advance the effort. On August 7, 1961, activist Reggie Robinson hosted the first voter education session there and helped open a voter registration school above the supermarket, where he and other SNCC workers prepared local residents for a registration exam that required applicants to interpret clauses of the Mississippi Constitution to the registrar's satisfaction. Initially ten people joined the classes, but only four took the exam and only two applications were approved, though the classes soon more than doubled in size. After a student protest march to City Hall, the principal of Burglund High School demanded that students avoid future protests or face expulsion, and on October 16, 1961, more than one hundred students refused and returned their textbooks. SNCC then started Nonviolent High School for the expelled students, and the temple served as its temporary Freedom School until students began enrolling at Campbell Junior College in Jackson. These efforts in McComb encouraged Black citizens in Pike County to become registered voters and inspired wider voting-rights activism in southwest Mississippi, which brought a violent White backlash. At 12:50 a.m. on August 15, 1964, a bomb exploded at the Burgland Supermarket, damaging the building and leaving a huge crater; investigators from local and state agencies and the FBI made no arrests. The bombing was part of a broader campaign of terror by McComb's revitalized Ku Klux Klan chapter, which bombed more than ten sites connected to the city's civil rights movement during 1964.
