A historic Gulfport building was vital in the civil rights era. Can it be saved?

The old building on Tegarden Road in Gulfport is crumbling and empty now, a relic of its busier days.

Long ago, it was a community center where neighbors met for church, where fraternal societies gathered, and where Black leaders striving for equality discussed integration and civil rights.

But a new generation of leaders is refusing to let the past fade.

“We’re just trying to preserve it,” said Terence McBride, president of the Handsboro Mississippi City Civic Organization. “You just don’t want something like that to be destroyed.”

Their campaign to save the historical site just got welcome news. The building, known as the Knights of Pythias Hall, was recently named among Mississippi’s most endangered historic places. McBride hopes the designation will draw more attention that could help his organization raise enough money to revive the community center and serve the Handsboro neighborhood again.

The challenges are steep. Hurricane Katrina damaged the building, which still has no roof. Its windows are boarded with signs that warn against trespassing, and the deteriorating structure is too dangerous to enter. Civic leaders estimate it will cost $1 million or more to open the doors again.

“It’s a big chunk of change,” said State Rep. Greg Haney, who represents the area and has advised the organization about how to find funding.

But the group is determined.

“This is a project they have just never let go,” said Lolly Rash, executive director of the Mississippi Heritage Trust, which announced the list of endangered historic places last month.

“They haven’t given up on it,” she said. “I just admire that.”

‘It was pivotal’

The hall, as most neighbors called it, was built in the 1930s and became a central meeting place for the tight-knit community.

It was also a key part of the region’s movement for civil rights.

In the 1960s, activists and neighborhood families gathered there for some of the first meetings about school integration. Rip Daniels, now a well-known radio host, remembers several meetings at the building when his parents volunteered his siblings, and eventually him, to be among the first Black students to attend white schools.

“It was pivotal,” Daniels said.

Over the years, the hall’s uses grew. The local African American chapter of the Knights of Pythias, the fraternal order that built the hall, met there for years. So did Boy Scouts. Families distributed food across the community from the building, which also hosted voter registration drives.

It was the area’s first Head Start center, too. The program coordinator, a local leader in education and voting rights named Grace Lombard, drew the attention of the Sovereignty Commission, Mississippi’s segregationist spy agency. Civil rights activists chose the hall for meetings because it was less conspicuous than churches, which the Ku Klux Klan often bombed.

It was one block from the home of Joseph Austin, a publisher and community leader whose civil rights activism drew vicious threats. At least one known Klansman lived nearby. And Black-owned restaurants and nightclubs that could not operate elsewhere in the era of segregation grounded the bustling neighborhood.

“It was a thriving community,” McBride said. “It was self-supported.”

After Katrina, the building went quiet. A few years ago, some local political leaders, neighbors and organizers wearing shirts that read “save the hall” gathered there again to unveil a historical marker. But most traces of the past have vanished.

Restoration hopes

That could change. The Handsboro Mississippi City Civic Organization, which used to meet in the building, has been seeking help to restore it. They want to move back in and offer technology training, after school support and a place to get information after hurricanes. They would also like part of the building to become a museum.

Rash, at the Mississippi Heritage Trust, said she hopes that including the property on this year’s list of endangered historic places could help other communities across the state with historic fraternal orders realize their importance. She has seen restoration efforts succeed before and has faith in this one, too.

The civic organization is busy these days, seeking old photos of the hall and trying to secure grant money and donations to restore it.

McBride hopes that the building will become a busy community center again in his lifetime.

But if it takes longer, “it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I just keep trucking along and hoping that somebody realizes what we see, and how important it is.”