On June 12, the Henry Ford will proudly unveil a significant artifact from the Civil Rights Movement: the relocated Selma, Alabama, home of Dr. and Mrs. Sullivan Jackson in Greenfield Village. The home — where the couple lived with their only child — served as a safe haven and command center for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others as they planned the historic Selma-to-Montgomery marches for voting rights in 1965.
King was famously photographed in the home watching President Johnson’s televised speech on March 15, 1965, calling upon Congress to create the Voting Rights Act, which he signed into law months later. The act enforced the 15th Amendment and eliminated barriers that effectively prevented racial minorities from voting‚ particularly in the South.
The Jackson home is the main showpiece of The Henry Ford’s yearlong celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday, America: 250 Years in the Making.
“When we acquired the Rosa Parks bus in 2001, it gave us the ability to talk about civil rights, freedom, and our country’s core democratic values,” says Patricia Mooradian, president and CEO of The Henry Ford. “We also have several Black heritage buildings in Greenfield Village, so the Jackson home helps us connect the dots and allows us to tell the story of another key period in American history.”
History of the Home
Built in 1919, the home at 1416 Lapsley St. in Selma became the residence of newlyweds Dr. Sullivan Jackson, a dentist, and his wife, Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson, in 1958. Friends of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, the couple opened their home to civil rights activists from November 1964 to March 1965, hosting Dr. King and dozens of others during the planning of the marches.
In Richie Jean’s book, The House by the Side of the Road: The Selma Civil Rights Movement (The University of Alabama Press, 2011), she writes that President Johnson called the home on countless occasions to speak with King. Visitors included King’s fellow Nobel Prize winner Dr. Ralph Bunche, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Walter Reuther, Jesse Jackson, John Conyers, James Baldwin, Dick Gregory, and numerous national reporters. The Jacksons’ daughter, Jawana, who was 4 at the time, fondly recalls sitting on “Uncle Martin’s” lap as he read her bedtime stories.
The Roads to Greenfield Village
After Richie Jean passed away in 2013, Jawana turned the home into a local museum. After several years, she realized that “the house belonged to the world,” so she “began a quest to identify a place that could not only accept a whole house but really tell the multiple stories.” Through a tip from a visitor at the house, she learned of The Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village.
In February 2022, she called to see whether the Dearborn museum would be interested in acquiring and relocating her childhood home to Greenfield Village.
Mooradian remembers that first phone conversation well.
“We, of course, know the history of the Voting Rights Act, but we did not know about the Jackson home and the activities that took place there that helped secure voting rights for millions of Americans.” she says. “Jawana sent us copies of The House by the Side of the Road, and after we read it, we said, ‘This is an incredible part of American history,’ and we immediately began exploring how we could make this happen.”
Mooradian first sent a research team, including engineers, to Selma to see the home and determine all that would be involved in moving it.
“Whenever we take on new projects that require capital, we raise the money first. The home was at risk, so this was the first time in my 20-year tenure as CEO that our board allowed us to proceed with the project at the same time as we began raising the necessary funds,” Mooradian says about the $30 million project. “It was a bit of a risk, but they knew the story was so important that the home had to be preserved.”
To help with the home’s relocation, reconstruction, and programming, the Erb Family Foundation provided a $5 million lead gift.
John Erb, the foundation’s chair, explained the motivation behind the grant in a news release: “We believe this project comes at a time that resonates all too much with what our parents witnessed in the ’60s, as our country is experiencing increasing efforts to erase Black history and the contributions [of] Black Americans, like those of the Jackson family and other civil rights activists.”
In fall 2023, the home’s contents, including more than 8,000 artifacts, were removed for conservation. The house was then split in two and loaded onto trailers for the 1,060-mile journey through five states to Dearborn. After the home arrived at Greenfield Village in 2024, teams prepared the site, laid a new foundation, and painstakingly reassembled the house. In spring 2026, many original artifacts and decorations were reinstalled to recreate the house’s look from 1965.
Countdown to Opening Day
You can find the Jackson home on Greenfield Village’s Maple Lane, between the McGuffey birthplace and the George Washington Carver cabin. It’s just a stone’s throw from the Hermitage Plantation slave quarters and the Logan County Courthouse, where the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln once practiced law.
“A lot of our buildings are about wellknown people like Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers, but what is so special about the Jackson home is that they were an ordinary family that said yes to something that was extraordinarily dangerous and yet were willing to help fight for what our Constitution stands for,” Mooradian says.
Among the many original artifacts displayed in the home are the chair King sat in when he watched Johnson’s speech, the bed he slept in, and the dining room table and chairs where Richie Jean served meals and meetings took place.
“The level of detail that our team researched in order to restore the home to 1965 is outstanding,” Mooradian says. “While many of the original details of the home were intact, if we found something missing, it was made to be identical to the original. Underneath newer carpeting, they found fragments of the original carpeting, matched it, and had it made.” The team also scraped down layers of paint to match the house’s original wall color seen in photos from 1965.
“We took cuttings of a lot of the plants surrounding the home in Selma and propagated them in our greenhouses over the winter. So a lot of the plantings surrounding the Jackson Home are right from the Jackson family gardens,” Mooradian continues, “and the distance of the house from the road is the same distance as the home was in their Selma neighborhood.”
Award-winning author, filmmaker, and television producer Nelson George was hired to create a documentary that will come out after the house opens, according to Mooradian.
On June 12, Jawana, the guest of honor, will cut the ribbon to open the historic home to the public. As many as 1.7 million annual visitors (2025) can learn about the Jackson home’s legacy. “The opening of the home will be an incredible, joyous time, and I’m so excited,” she says.
“I’ll never forget, Dr. King and I were having tea and cookies together, and he said, ‘Jawana, promise Uncle Martin that as you grow, you will always touch others so you will be touched,’” she recalls. “Sixty years later, I’m still touching others because this home will now touch millions of people. I am in awe that it will still be welcoming people committed to everything that we hold dear as a people, a country, and a society.”
More Black Heritage Buildings at Greenfield Village
Hermitage Slave Quarters
Enslaved African Americans built and lived in these brick quarters on the Hermitage Plantation, owned by Henry McAlpin and located in a rice-growing region just north of Savannah, Georgia.
Mattox Family Home
Amos and Grace Mattox — descendants of enslaved African Americans — raised their
two children in this rural Georgia farmhouse during the Great Depression.
Logan County Courthouse
Between 1840 and 1847, Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, tried cases here as a traveling lawyer. He worked mostly on cases resolving neighbors’ disagreements over land, contracts, and debts. As Lincoln traveled, people got to know him because he always took the time to talk to them.
George Washington Carver Memorial
Henry Ford first thought of dedicating a building to George Washington Carver after the two met in 1937. In spring 1942, construction began on a cabin loosely based on Carver’s descriptions of his southwest Missouri birthplace. By about 1950, a sign had been installed over the door, and the building had been whitewashed.
The Susquehanna Plantation House
Home to the Carroll family, the Susquehanna Plantation was one of the largest, most productive farms in southern Maryland during the 1800s. Its success was made possible through the labor of 75 enslaved African Americans.
These descriptions, provided by The Henry Ford’s website, have been edited for brevity.
This story originally appeared in the June 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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