The building went up in early 1942 and opened on March 22 as a USO club for Black soldiers training at Camp Shelby. It is a plain, T-shaped wooden hall with an auditorium, a stage and meeting rooms. The USO's stated policy was inclusion, but in Hattiesburg it set up a separate center, so that Black service members could use its services without the trouble that could meet them in downtown streets, as the organization's own account puts it. A volunteer later remembered the soldiers as elated to have a home away from home.
White civic leaders chaired the management committee, but an advisory committee drawn from the Mobile Street business district helped see the club through, and 344 local volunteers gave some 40,000 hours between 1942 and 1946. The club ran a library, a writing room, a snack bar, showers, mail service and counseling, and it hosted dances, bands and weddings. Mobile Street's Black-run theaters, restaurants and hotels, built up over decades, made up the rest of what a soldier on pass could find.
The building later took the name N. R. Burger Center, for the principal of Eureka High School, and it now houses the African American Military History Museum. Exhibits follow Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War through Iraq, and the collection includes a nearly complete set of Spanish-American War medals. The building is on the National Register of Historic Places and is a Mississippi Landmark. It stands a little more than a block from Mobile Street, so pair it with the Freedom Summer stops along that street.
The closest stops worth working into your route