Built partly as a response to city officials who had denied the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) the use of the nearby College Park Auditorium for large gatherings, this two-story brick building with a dining room on the first floor also accommodated the headquarters of the Mississippi NAACP on the second floor. The combination auditorium and gymnasium, with seating for 1,300 people, hosted an opening address by Thurgood Marshall in May 1955 and was again filled in June 1963 for Medgar Evers’s funeral.
John R. Lynch Street, named for the first African American Speaker in the Mississippi House of Representatives, became the spine of Jackson’s first black suburban neighborhood in the early twentieth century. A few buildings remain, notably the unassuming one-story, concrete-block building at number 1017 that housed the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a Mississippi-based umbrella group for the NAACP, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC).