Home Key to Civil Rights Movement Coming to Greenfield Village

By Miriam Marini, Detroit Free Press, Updated October 2, 2023, 4:41pm

A home key to the Civil Rights Movement is moving to Dearborn, more than 800 miles away from its current location in Selma, Alabama.

Thanks to a $5 million grant from the Erb Family Foundation, the home of Dr. and Mrs. Sullivan Jackson is coming to The Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, the foundation and museum announced Monday. The Selma home served as a hub for organizers — including Martin Luther King Jr. — while planning the Selma-to-Montgomery marches during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, when activists across the nation pushed for equal rights for African Americans and to put an end to racial segregation.

The Jackson House is being relocated to the Dearborn campus per the request of Jawana Jackson, the Jacksons’ only child and owner of the Jackson House. Jawana reached out to The Henry Ford in 2022 to ask for the home to be relocated to Greenfield Village to stand alongside other sites where history occurred, including the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law and the workshop where Orville and Wilbur Wright invented their first airplane. 

The grant from the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation will provide funding to help move the house to Dearborn, support its reconstruction in Greenfield Village and craft on-site programming and digital access suited for global audiences, according to The Henry Ford.

In an undated photo provided by Jawana Jackson, the Jackson House in Selma, Ala, which was home base for Martin Luther King Jr., who, along with other civil rights leaders, planned the Selma to Montgomery marches for Black voting rights, has been acquired by a historical museum in Michigan and will be moved to a site near Detroit for preservation. It will be dismantled starting this summer and trucked more than 800 miles north to The Henry Ford's Greenfield Village in Dearborn. The project is expected to take two to three years.

Why is the Jackson House historic?

While it may appear like a standard midcentury family home from the outside, the residence helped to further the liberation of African Americans in the United States throughout the 20th century. Dr. Sullivan Jackson, a dentist, and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson, an educator, lived in the home for 50 years, but even before then, the home had a mark in history.

According to the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium, the home was built in 1912 and served as a guest house for W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington, who held “fireside chats” in the house regarding education, community building, and economic sustainability.

Decades later, the home served as a safe haven for organizers during the Civil Rights Movement, including King and Dr. Ralph Bunche, to organize protest marches from Selma to the state capital to demonstrate a demand for voting rights.

The Jackson House also served as the home of the Juanita Richardson Sherrod Solitude Art Collection, te 1,800-piece Burwell rare book collection, and the 2,000-piece Burwell-Dinkins rare music collection, according to the consortium, and is featured on a number of historical preservation lists, including the World Monuments Watch List and the National Historic Register.

A horse-drawn bus and Model T truck pass each other at The Henry Ford, Friday, April 14, 2023, in Dearborn, Mich. Named after Ford Motor Co. founder and American industrialist Henry Ford, The Henry Ford sits on 250 acres and features a museum and Greenfield Village, where more than 80 historic structures are displayed and maintained. The Jackson House from Selma, Ala., will join the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln first practiced law, the laboratory where Thomas Edison perfected the lightbulb and the home and workshop where Orville and Wilbur Wright invented their first airplane.

What other historic landmarks live at Greenfield Village?

The campus in Dearborn also features prizes from the past like the laboratory where Thomas Edison furthered the invention of the lightbulb, Detroit’s Grimm Jewelry Store that stood on Michigan Avenue from 1886 until 1931, and the cabin of agricultural scientist George Washington Carver that Henry Ford built in 1942.

The Jackson House is coming to Michigan this fall and will be permanently placed in Greenfield Village in 2026. 

Contact Miriam Marini: [email protected]

This article was originally published on October 2nd by Detroit Free Press.

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