Inside The Jackson Home: A Voting Rights Landmark Opens at Greenfield Village

The Jackson Home has stood for more than 100 years. Its owners, Dr. Sullivan and his wife, Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson, served Selma's Black community and were deeply woven into the fabric of Black professional life in Alabama. But it was their friendship with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that placed their home at the center of history.

The Jacksons opened their home to Dr. King and other civil rights leaders as a place for rest during the Selma to Montgomery marches of 1965. The marches were a series of protests in which hundreds of demonstrators walked 54 miles from Selma to Alabama's state capital to demand the voting rights that had been promised to all Americans but denied to so many. Hundreds of people came through the home’s doors: Nobel Peace Prize winners, U.S. congressmen, international dignitaries, activists, and organizers. It was here that Dr. King and many others worked, slept, and strategized for months, frequently speaking over the phone with President Lyndon B. Johnson about the urgent need for voting rights legislation.

The home's most charged moments were lived in its ordinary rooms. Around the maple dining table, movement leaders broke bread and mapped plans. In an upholstered armchair facing a black-and-white television, Dr. King watched President Johnson address Congress and proclaim "We shall overcome," signifying a pledge to pass the Voting Rights Act. The home also witnessed meetings between the first and second Black men to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, when Dr. King hosted Dr. Ralph Bunche. On August 6, 1965, the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. The strategy that shaped that moment was formed, in part, inside the Jackson Home on Lapsley Street.

For decades after the Civil Rights Movement, the Jackson family kept the home and its contents largely intact as a quiet, remarkable act of stewardship. When Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson passed, their daughter Jawana Jackson made it her mission to fulfill her parents' wishes and ensure the home's legacy would endure. In 2022, she reached out directly to The Henry Ford, requesting that they acquire, relocate, and elevate her childhood home. The reasoning was simple and powerful: the piece of history was at risk of being lost where it stood, and she believed the house belonged to the world.