The Events That Took Place in This Selma, Alabama, Home Were Key to the Civil Rights Movement, and You Can Now Visit It

The Jackson family opened their home to civil rights leaders planning the Selma-to-Montgomery march, which led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The entire house was recently moved to Greenfield Village at The Henry Ford, in Dearborn, Michigan

Carole Ronsenblat | Freelance travel writer

June 12, 2026 9:35 a.m.

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I grew up in the late 1960s and ’70s in Oak Park, Michigan, a Detroit suburb just across 8 Mile Road, made famous by the rapper Eminem in song and film. At some point, nearly every kid in southeast Michigan visited Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum, whether on a school trip or with their family.

With its collection of historic items, including the chair Abraham Lincoln sat in when he was shot, the bus Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of and the Kennedy limousine, famously shown in the Zapruder film, the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, is not to be missed. Greenfield Village, the outdoor area of what is now collectively referred to as The Henry Ford, is filled with historic properties moved from their original locations to preserve and protect them, while also allowing 1.6 million annual visitors from around the world to step inside structures that witnessed history.

While I was in Oak Park, Jawana Jackson was growing up in Selma, Alabama, where she and her family experienced the discrimination and tumult directed at African Americans in the 1960s. “Generations of my ancestors had experienced so much, and during the ’50s and ’60s, things just galvanized, particularly after Brown v. Board of Education,” says Jackson. “People around the United States, particularly the African American community, knew it was a time of change.”

During this time, Jackson’s parents invited activists to their home. Sullivan Jackson, a dentist, and his wife, Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson, a teacher—later the author of The House by the Side of the Road: The Selma Civil Rights Movement—opened their house at 1416 Lapsley Avenue to leaders of the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr., to plan the final, four-day Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Jackson’s world and mine have been very different, and yet now they are colliding. After moving 1,093 miles, the Jackson home sits in Greenfield Village, where visitors can tour it beginning this weekend. A walk through the Arts and Crafts-style bungalow is a walk through history. Visitors will stand in the bedroom where King slept, his pajamas carefully laid on the bed, and see the desk, his favorite place to work, and the dining room table where activists, politicians and civil rights and spiritual leaders broke bread and discussed march plans. Photos on display capture poignant moments, including the prayer session held in the home the morning of the march.

“I’m hoping that this house will add to the narrative, the history, the story that Greenfield Village tells about America, and how we are our strongest when we all come together,” says Jackson.

“The world had a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; I had an Uncle Martin”

The Jacksons were longtime friends of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King, explains Amber Mitchell, curator of Black history at The Henry Ford. “The ladies were childhood friends. In fact, as a child, Mrs. Jackson knew many ladies who were critical to this story, including Juanita Jones Abernathy”—she also knew Ralph Abernathy from childhood—“and Jean Childs Young, the first wife of future ambassador Andrew Young, who came into this home as well.”

King had been staying with the Jacksons during visits to Selma since the 1950s. Their house stood just down the street from Selma University, a major Black theological school where King and other pastors often came to attend and give lectures.

“Around 1964, after decades of activism by the Selma community, led by the Dallas County Voters League and their team of the Courageous Eight”—which included Marie Foster, Sullivan’s sister, who worked as a hygienist in his dental office—“and at the height of the civil rights movement, Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which he was president at the time, were invited to Selma by the Dallas County Voters League,” says Mitchell. Hoping to turn their local movement into a national one, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) knew that “where Dr. King goes, media attention goes.”

King contacted the Jacksons, asking to stay with them while he and other leaders worked on organizing a four-day march from Selma to Montgomery. This prompted Richie Jean to redecorate the home, changing the 1950s florals to a more modern 1960s look. It’s this décor that visitors to the home at The Henry Ford will see.

King arrived at the home for a lengthy stay on January 1, 1965. Many of his lieutenants, including James Bevel, Andrew Young, Hosea Williams and C.T. Vivian, also stayed with the Jacksons during some of this time, and members of Congress who were sympathetic to the movement arrived for meals cooked by Richie Jean. When Ralph Bunche, an American political scientist and diplomat, visited the home, it led to the only meeting between the first and second African American Nobel Prize winners in history.

“As a 4-year-old, I could not understand the complexities of what was going on,” says Jackson. “But I did realize that the feelings in the house had changed. When you have the president of the United States calling in to your parents’ home, when you’re having conversations going on, on a regular basis, it was an incredible time. There was a lot of energy going on in our home that previously had a mother, father and a little girl. The world had a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; I was a little girl who had an Uncle Martin in the house.”

Planning the march

Though three Selma-to-Montgomery marches took place that March 1965, King and the other leaders planned the four-day march (the final one) from the Jackson home. Beginning at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, the march ended successfully at the Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery.

For a year and a half before the marches, President Lyndon B. Johnson and King spoke often. “He was in constant deliberations with President Johnson about his dream for a four-day peaceful march from Selma to Montgomery,” says Jackson. King often spoke to Johnson by phone from a bedroom in the house that doubled as an office. “My mother was the keeper of the door, and made sure that during those marathon phone conversations, no one would penetrate that room,” Jackson recalls.

The first march, organized by future Representatives John Lewis and Hosea Williams, took place on March 7, 1965, and would be known in history as “Bloody Sunday.” As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the approximately 600 marchers were met by Alabama state troopers ordering them to disperse. When, instead, the marchers kneeled to pray, police dispensed tear gas and began beating them with nightsticks. The second march, just two days later, called “Turnaround Tuesday,” was led by King. After crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, participants were again met by troopers. King and other clergy led the group in prayer before turning back toward Selma.

Just shy of a week after the two unsuccessful marches, and just less than a week before the final march, King sat in an easy chair in the Jacksons’ living room on March 15, watching intensely as Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress in what would become known as “The American Promise” speech. Johnson’s use of the phrase “We shall overcome,” which had become an anthem of the movement, was interpreted by many of the 70 million people watching the broadcast as his offering the movement the full backing of the White House.

Finally, March 21, 1965, the date of the last march that King and the SCLC had spent those long days at the Jackson home planning, arrived. King slept at the Jackson home the first night of the march and joined marchers camping on the nights that followed. Thousands marched during the four days it took to get from Selma to Montgomery County, and the number grew to 25,000 on March 25, the day they marched through the city and to the state capitol.

That same month, Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act, which was passed just four months later, dismantling voter suppression against racial minorities.

The future of the house where history was planned

Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson lived in the house until their deaths, in 2004 and 2013, respectively. Understanding the importance of the home in relation to the civil rights movement, Jawana Jackson, their sole heir, opened it as a museum in 2014, displaying its interior—including the chair that King sat in to watch Johnson’s American Promise speech—and creating signage to tell its stories. About 5,000 people visited the home in the nine years before it was moved to Greenfield Village

With no descendants, Jackson realized that to preserve the home and continue to share the stories from that pivotal time, something needed to be done. “I knew that the house deserved a larger platform,” says Jackson. “I knew that the house deserved many more eyes to see it, and people to touch it. History is portable.” So she contacted The Henry Ford in 2022, and the museum sent a team of four to Selma.

“We went down to evaluate from a bunch of different perspectives, including programmatic, collections and institutional advancement,” says Alec Jerome, senior director of facilities management for The Henry Ford. “I went down in the interest of whether or not this house could be moved.”

The team deemed the move not just possible but the only way to guarantee the home’s historic preservation while also allowing many more people to visit and understand the important events that happened there.

The museum’s previous structure relocation was undertaken more than 40 years prior and amounted to only about 200 miles. This house, built in 1919 and measuring 2,000 square feet, needed to travel more than 1,000 miles.

Over the following months, Jerome and others, including architects, structural engineers, general contractors and a project manager, made more visits, all to devise a plan to move the home. They took scans and created a historic-structures report according to guidelines set by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

A house divided

The move began in November 2023. Taking into consideration size limits for highway transportation, the team removed the roof and cut the house in half. The roof and various other pieces, including windows, roofing shingles and the chimney and foundation bricks, were boxed and shipped prior to transporting the main house structure. As Jerome explains, “The deconstruction took about three months, during which we cataloged and recorded all of the [pieces] so it could be reconstructed exactly as it was in Selma.”

This left just the two halves of the house to move. A core group of nine people was ready to get on the road. The convoy included a pilot car, two drivers for the trailer carrying the house, a support vehicle and a photographer-videographer who used a drone to evaluate road conditions and upcoming tight turns (and get some pretty cool video footage). Also, “because of the significance of the house,” says Jerome, “we didn’t want to leave it unattended, so the museum rented a Winnebago, and we had four officers following every step of the way,” and stationed next to the house overnight.

Five states and 1,060 miles later, they’d transported only half the home, and would immediately return to Selma to retrieve the second half. After being stored in a warehouse in New Hudson, Michigan, while the foundation was being laid, the house was moved its final 33 miles to Greenfield Village.

A forever home

When Henry Ford designed Greenfield Village, he wanted it to tell the story of America. He objected to the limited history taught in schools, which, in his view, emphasized kings and generals but not ordinary people and tools for everyday life. As he told his secretary, “We’re going to start something. I’m going to start up a museum and give people a true picture of the development of the country. That’s the only history that is worth observing, that you can preserve in itself.”

Today, the 80-acre open-air museum is organized into seven historical districts. The Jackson home sits on Maple Lane, in the Porches and Parlors district. “The theme of this district is all about home, and what that means for people,” says Mitchell. “The Jackson home is really our crown jewel of several Black heritage spaces within the Village. Basically, within two long blocks, we’re able to tell 200 years of Black history in one area, ranging from the history of enslavement … all the way to 1965, where we can explore the history of the voting rights movement through the lens of the Jackson home.”

This weekend’s block party, welcoming the Jackson home to the neighborhood, promises to be a joyous celebration of community, courage and culture, featuring special programs, Southern-inspired food, musical performances, a Black-owned-business market and more.

“I’m thrilled that the house is there and is now in its forever home,” says Jackson.

Carole Ronsenblat | Read More

Carole Ronsenblat is a freelance travel writer. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Afar, Travel + Leisure, Atlas Obscura, CNN Travel and other publications.