House Where Martin Luther King Jr Planned Alabama Marches Moving To Dearborn
Selma home heads to The Henry Ford Museum
A lot was happening in March 1965 in the bungalow in Selma, Alabama, that then-4-year-old Jawana Jackson called home, and much of it involved her “Uncle Martin.”
There were late-night visitors, phone calls and meetings at the house that was a safe haven for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders as they planned the Selma to Montgomery marches calling for Black voting rights.
The role the Jackson House played was integral to the Civil Rights Movement, so Jackson contacted the The Henry Ford Museum near Detroit about a year ago to ask if it would take over the preservation of the Jackson House and its legacy.
“It became increasingly clearer to me that the house belonged to the world, and quite frankly, The Henry Ford was the place that I always felt in my heart that it needed to be,” she told The Associated Press last week from her home in Pensacola, Florida.
Starting this year, the Jackson House will be dismantled piece-by-piece and trucked the more than 800 miles (1,280 kilometers) north to Dearborn, Michigan, where it will eventually be open to the public as part of the history museum. The project is expected to take up to three years.
Owned by dentist Sullivan Jackson and his wife, Richie Jean, the 3,000-square-foot (280-square-meter) home was where King and others strategized the three marches against racist Jim Crow laws that prevented Black people from voting in the Deep South.
King was inside the home when President Lyndon Johnson announced a bill that would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
