Dearborn — Officials celebrated Greenfield Village’s newest site on Thursday as reconstruction efforts begin for a Selma, Alabama house where Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights organizers strategized.
Jawana Jackson, daughter of homeowners Dr. Sullivan Jackson and Richie Jean Sherrod, asked The Henry Ford to acquire the house in 2022, she said.
Her parents opened their doors and offered haven for activists who would use the space to help plan the marches for Black suffrage from Selma to Montgomery, Jackson added.
King stayed in the house and spoke on their phone with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, she said. He was also there to watch Johnson’s televised address to Congress introducing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Jackson said her choice to preserve the home and relocate it to Greenfield Village feels especially relevant to The Henry Ford’s legacy in honoring innovation.
“Someone told me just this morning, ‘The house will go to its home,’ ” she said. “Imagine that: a house going to its home.”
Jackson and her husband joined officials at a ceremony Thursday where they poured jars of soil from the original property, built in 1912, onto a Greenfield Village construction site.
The Jackson House will open to the public in 2026, Patricia Mooradian, president and CEO of The Henry Ford, said at the event.
Crews removed items in the home for conservation last fall, according to the website. Workers also took apart the structure and transported it in trailers back to Michigan, where it will arrive to Dearborn by the end of the month.
The reconstruction project amounts to a $30 million endeavor for The Henry Ford and includes reconstruction, educational programming, artifact digitization and stewardship, Mooradian said.
More: Greenfield Village project to move house where MLK planned marches gets $5M grant
“By relocating The Jackson House to Greenfield Village, we will enable 1.6 million visitors every year — and millions more in the future, and through our digital outreach ― to engage with this vital piece of history,” she said.
The house is an important piece of U.S. history to teach to future generations, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson said at the ceremony.
Benson’s professional career began in Montgomery, Alabama, where she was inspired by the area’s history to work in the service of democracy, she said.
President Johnson’s federal Voting Rights Acts became one of the country’s greatest pieces of legislation, she added.
Americans have another opportunity “to make real the promise of democracy” in the upcoming November elections, Benson said.
“I’m grateful that this exhibit, that this home, will be here in this historical place that means so much to our state to teach the next generation that they, too, must stand up and protect our democracy,” she said.
Students across the country set out to register Black voters in the summer of 1964, now known as Freedom Summer, said the Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit Branch NAACP.
“Now we’re in Freedom Summer, too, because we have, for the first time in America’s history, an African American woman running for president of the United States,” Anthony said. “And people are coming from across the country to register to vote, to volunteer, to get engaged, because we ain’t going back.”
The Jackson House is the first home property added to Greenfield Village in nearly four decades, said Amber Mitchell, curator of Black History at The Henry Ford.
The Jackson family left valuable lessons on the civil rights movement for future visitors to their home, she said: they were among hundreds who opened their homes and offered food, shelter and rest to organizers on the road.
“It is my extreme pleasure to reintroduce to the world the story of the Jacksons, which comes to us in a moment where voting has never mattered more, reminding us that there is so much more that this old home from Lapsley Avenue in Selma has left to teach us,” she said. “And I hope that all of you will open your ears, hearts and minds to the lessons still left to learn.”
Thursday’s dedication ceremony brought a lot of joy to Jackson, she said.
Jackson’s childhood home has so much to offer generations of visitors who will get to touch, see and feel the house, she said. “This house coming to Greenfield Village is yet another light that will light a path for all of us to follow. We won’t go back. We’re moving forward.”
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Publish date : 2024-08-08 07:52:00
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