This house was a pivotal center of the civil rights movement in Natchez, serving during the 1960s as the headquarters of the local NAACP, the home of branch president George Metcalfe, and a boarding house where civil rights activists lived. During Freedom Summer of 1964, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee resided here, including Dorie Ladner, Janet Jemmott, George Green, and Annie Pearl Avery, who helped guard the house. Local women including Jessie B. Williams and Mamie Lee Green Mazique also worked here. Because of Metcalfe's NAACP work, the Ku Klux Klan threatened him, and in late January 1965 night riders fired shots through a window of the house. On August 27, 1965, Metcalfe was seriously injured when the Klan bombed his car. That year, after the attack, a chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice was established to provide armed self-defense for the movement and Natchez's Black community. Soon afterward, Mississippi NAACP Field Director Charles Evers used the house as a hub for the local movement, holding meetings there and addressing large crowds from the front steps. In December 1965, after a three-month boycott, the city's mayor and movement leaders announced an agreement on protesters' demands that brought sweeping concessions, including better law enforcement, desegregation of public facilities, condemnation of the Ku Klux Klan and violence, appointments and hiring opportunities for African Americans, equal courtesy among all races, and a housing code for better living conditions. Klan violence nevertheless continued, and on February 27, 1967, Wharlest Jackson Sr., a friend of Metcalfe and NAACP treasurer, was killed when a bomb hidden in his truck exploded. The Natchez movement centered on marches, self-defense, and economic boycotts, winning major concessions from the city's white leadership, and its three-point model of armed defense, boycott of white-owned businesses, and enforcement of the boycott in the Black community was later replicated elsewhere in Mississippi, especially in southwest Mississippi's Black communities.
