The Selma, Ala. Jackson Home, a civil rights landmark, has been acquired by The Henry Ford at Greenfield Village | The Henry Ford at Greenfield Village photo
This is the third in a series of articles by Michigan Advance throughout February celebrating Black History Month.
Starting this summer, visitors to The Henry Ford in Dearborn will be able to see the home where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stayed in Selma, Ala. during the Civil Rights Movement — down to the pajamas that he wore while there — bringing a key location in Black history to Michigan.
The Jackson Family Home will open as a part of the museum’s Greenfield Village in June, a part of the open-air museum that features seven historical districts, including structures like Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, the Logan County Courthouse where a young Abraham Lincoln practiced law and a real Ford Model T car.
The actual house, a single-story Southern-style bungalow home, was designed by one of the only practicing Black trained architects in Alabama, Wallace Rayfield, and built in 1919 in a historically Black neighborhood in Selma. It was one of many purpose-built homes for the professional Black middle class of the area, and this house specifically was the home of three Black dentists over the course of its history — the last of whom was Dr. Sullivan Jackson and his wife Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson, close personal friends of Dr. King and his wife Coretta Scott King.
Because of their friendship — which started when Richie Jean and Coretta were childhood school friends in Washington, D.C. — King stayed with the Jacksons when he was in Selma, a key location throughout the Civil Rights Movement.
“The Jacksons’ home was his safe landing spot,” said Jim Johnson, the director of Greenfield Village and a curator of the project. “We’re talking in the late 1950s when that was taking place. You have to put in perspective, Black people just couldn’t call and make a hotel reservation to stay anywhere. There were only certain places where Black people could stay in hotels. There were very few Black owned hotels.”
It became one of King’s bases of operations in Selma, along with the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The Jacksons lived in the home from 1958 until Mrs. Jackson died in 2013, at which point their only daughter, Jawana, converted the house into a small museum where it stood in Selma. In late 2021, she contacted the Henry Ford staff directly to propose moving the house into Greenfield Village.
Moving a house from Alabama to Michigan is no easy feat, Johnson explained.
“Instead of dismantling the house, we partially dismantled the house, which meant we took off the roof and all the roofing members,” he said. “We removed the front porch of the house. We removed permanently the 1970s era family room addition that was put on the back of the house. And then we literally cut the house in half from side to side.”
The two sides of the house were then loaded onto specialized trailer trucks and driven nearly 900 miles through five states, each with their own regulations on transporting such a large load. The first truck took nine days to arrive in Michigan.
Once both pieces of the home arrived in Michigan, curators were able to begin restoring it to what it would have looked like around 1965. Though the house underwent renovations after that point, including drywall being installed over most surfaces in the house, museum staff were able to remove that — and used the “ghosting” outlines from nicotine smoke to replace picture frames and other wall hangings to their original locations.
Other details about the home were sourced from photographs, including a series of photos taken by Frank Dandridge for Life Magazine, which show King in the house. One of those details is a pajama set, which will be displayed on the bed in which King slept while he stayed with the Jacksons — a real set of Sullivan Jackson’s pajamas that he regularly lent to King to use.
It’s important to Johnson that visitors will understand the stakes of what went on in the Jackson family home during the Civil Rights era and the dangers that he faced.
“You’ll be actually entering the back door of the house much the same door that Dr. King and everybody else would have entered, because it was not safe to come to the front door,” Johnson said. “There was danger and there were threats. The FBI was under surveillance, there were bomb threats, the phone was tapped, so there was lots of certain danger involved. So we’ll make that clear, that’s the reason you’re coming in the back door.”
Within Greenfield Village, the historical significance of this home will be paralleled to the milestones of major inventions of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers, Johnson explained.
“This house was the home of an affluent Black family, but it was an average family, and they stepped up and opened their home basically to the world and this history transpired in and amongst them in their home, leading to the signing of the Voting Rights Act in August of 1965,” he said.
Having this house in Michigan specifically is also an important part of the state’s Black history.
“There are still many, many families living in and around the Detroit area that descend from people that made that northern migration, that still have pretty significant ties to Alabama and of course there’s lots of connections with the Civil Rights Movement and different things like that as well. Dr. King was very active in the north, very active in Detroit, had amazing connections with Motown and Barry Gordy,” Johnson said.
He added that in the context of Greenfield Village, this house will be one of the newest in terms of its historical significance, which he described as a “huge leap” — though the village does include some homes from the 20th century, it does not go much past the 1920s or 30s.
And having the home in a museum named for Henry Ford — whose racist and antisemitic views are still regularly referenced by white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups as inspiration — is an important part of the home’s legacy in Michigan.
“It’s hugely impactful and we’ve acknowledged his legacy but the work we’ve been doing over the past 40, 50 years has really moved things ahead by miles here,” Johnson said.
This story was originally produced by Michigan Advance, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Alabama Reflector, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
From Alabama Reflector Post Url: Visit
Author: Katherine Dailey