The Dr. John Banks House

The Dr. John Banks House was the home of the first African American physician in Natchez and a critical site in the civil rights movement. The house is named for Dr. John Bowman Banks, who was born on 14 February 1862 in Louisiana. He studied medicine at Meharry Medical College, a private, historically Black school in Nashville, Tennessee, and graduated in 1885. In 1889 he opened his practice in Natchez.

Banks and his wife, Sarah, had two children: a daughter, Alberta, who became a schoolteacher; and a son, Oliver, who became a doctor. Banks built his house in 1892 at 9 St. Catherine Street, about 1.2 miles east of the Mississippi River. The house is a two-story wood-framed structure that was built in the Queen Anne style. Around 1905 it was remodeled in the Colonial Revival style. Banks was a friend of Booker T. Washington, who stayed at his house as a guest when he visited Natchez in the early 1900s. On 30 December 1911, Banks died in his home at the age of forty-nine. The cause of his death was a cerebral hemorrhage.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Banks’s house served as the headquarters for the Natchez Branch of the NAACP. It was also the home of NAACP president George Metcalfe, who lived on the first floor. In 1964, during Freedom Summer, Metcalfe housed visiting civil rights activists at the site, including Dorie Ladner, Annie Pearl Avery, and Janet Jemmott, all members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Avery, who carried a .22-caliber pistol, provided security for the house. The house became known as “Metcalfe’s Boarding House.” Local women, such as NAACP secretary Jessie B. Williams, worked at the house in the NAACP office on the second floor, as did Mamie C. Mazique and Mary Lee Toles.

Metcalfe’s work in the movement made him a target of the Klan. In late January 1965, night riders fired shots through a window of his home. On 27 August 1965, Metcalfe suffered serious injuries when his car was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in the parking lot of the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Company, where he worked. Soon after the bombing, Charles Evers, who served as the Mississippi NAACP field director, came to Natchez to lead the NAACP. Evers, who was the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, used the Banks house as a hub for the civil rights movement. In the film Black Natchez (1967), Evers is shown addressing a rally from the front steps of the house.

The attempted assassination of Metcalfe galvanized the Black community. Among other things, it resulted in protest rallies, boycotts of white businesses, and the establishment of the Natchez Deacons for Defense and Justice, who provided armed protection for civil rights activists and the Black community. Together, these acts of protest led to significant change in Natchez, making the struggle one of the most successful movements in Mississippi. The movement exacted major concessions from the city’s white leadership, and it did so without the intervention of the federal government. The Natchez movement became a model that other Black communities in Mississippi replicated.

Wharlest Jackson Sr., another leader, also had connections to the Banks house. As the NAACP treasurer, he worked in the NAACP office along with Metcalfe, Williams, and others. On 27 February 1967, Jackson died in a Ku Klux Klan truck bombing. The Klan killed him, reportedly, because of his promotion to a job at Armstrong that had traditionally gone to white employees. No one was ever charged with his murder, and the case remains unsolved.

In 2011, Rose Hill Missionary Baptist Church, the oldest Black Baptist church in Mississippi, inherited the house from Banks’s grandson, Frank Robinson Jr. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2020 it was officially designated as the Dr. John Bowman Banks Museum.

In 2022 volunteers with the Natchez Civil Rights Trail Committee sought to have the house listed as the Natchez NAACP Headquarters on the Mississippi Freedom Trail. Their efforts proved successful as the Mississippi Humanities Council and Visit Mississippi approved the house to be listed on both the Mississippi Freedom Trail and the US Civil Rights Trail.