Greenfield Village buys historic house with ties to MLK
The house where Dr. King and others planned the 1965 voting rights march will be moved and reassembled in Dearborn.
The Jackson House
The Henry Ford bought an important civil rights landmark in Alabama and plans to bring it to Michigan. It’s the house where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other activists organized the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery.
The plan is to move the home to Greenfield Village in Dearborn.
“We have to really document the history, look through photographs and work on presenting it as authentically as possible.” — Patricia Mooradian, The Henry Ford CEO, on preserving the Jackson House
The museum’s president and CEO Patricia Mooradian says the relocation will happen in steps.
“We’ve pretty much ascertained that the house can be taken apart in pieces,” she says. “The roof, the chimney, the brick front porch can be divided and moved on a flatbed.”
Mooradian says it’ll take two or three years to take the house apart, move it and reassemble it.
It started with a phone call
Jawana Jackson’s family owned the house in Selma for over 100 years and she grew up there. Mooradian says Jackson reached out to her about preserving the home.
“Jawana called us out of the blue,” Mooradian says. “She did a very thorough PowerPoint presentation.”
Still, Mooradian admits she wasn’t sure why Jackson called her.
“That’s when she said, ‘Patricia, this house belongs to the world. I want as many people to learn from this house as possible and from the stories. This house needs to be in Greenfield Village,’” Mooradian says.
Preserving family history and civil rights history
The Jackson House contains a number of personal artifacts that will also come to Dearborn. Mooradian says it’s exciting to include the items, but it will take time to prepare them for public display.
“We have to really document the history, look through photographs and work on presenting it as authentically as possible,” she says.
Related: MLK and civil rights movement were more radical than we often remember, says Smithsonian historian
Jackson’s parents lived in the house until her mother died in 2013. While Jackson does not live there anymore, Mooradian says she has worked hard to maintain it.
“The condition of the home is basically how it was in 1965, with a few updates here and there,” Mooradian says. “It’s a very rare thing for a museum to find a home that maintained its condition from a historically significant time period.”
The Jackson House will be one of more than 80 historic structures in Greenfield Village, all of which are open to the public.
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