Royal Welcome of the Jackson House to its Resting Place in Michigan
Challenging Relocation of the Jackson House from Selma, Alabama, to Michigan
Before this year's Black History Month slips away . . .
“Now known as the Jackson Museum, this simple structure in Selma is a unique time capsule documenting one of the most momentous movements in U.S. history: the Selma to Montgomery marches, a sustained effort to ensure that all Americans would have the civil rights and voting rights promised to them.
“The house and its contents are a remarkable fusion of the ordinary and the epic: A maple dining table—around which civil rights leaders, U.S. congressmen, and two Nobel Peace Prize winners broke bread and shared dreams. An upholstered armchair facing a black-and-white television— the chair where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sat as he watched President Lyndon Johnson pledge to pass voting rights legislation. A bed with a pair of pajamas atop the covers—the bed and pajamas in which King spent many nights during the Selma to Montgomery marches.
“The Jackson House, now more than 100 years old, needs constant stewardship and upkeep. And its inspiring stories—of people and history converging at the intersection of family life and momentous events—richly deserve to be collected, curated, and shared with new generations, including the many millions of young people born in the decades since 1965.
“That's why the home's owner, Jawana Jackson—who, aged four in 1965, called the family's frequent, famous guest ‘Uncle Martin’—has reached out to The Henry Ford with an ambitious, audacious dream.”
. . .
“In This House
“Here, behind a humble façade, world-changing ideas, plans, and actions charged the air with hope:
- In this house Dr. Sullivan Jackson and his wife Richie Jean provided a safe haven for the nation's leading civil rights activists to strategize and plan.
- In this house the ‘Selma Movement’ and the momentous Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 were largely planned.
- In this house Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., worked and slept and strategized, along with key allies, for months before the Montgomery march.
- In this house King frequently spoke by phone with President Lyndon Johnson about the need to expand and protect Black voting rights through national legislation.
- In this house King and others watched, electrified, as President Johnson made a nationally televised address to Congress introducing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, proclaiming ‘We shall overcome.’”
The picture at the top of this blog shows a picture from Jet Magazine of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. holding a strategy meeting in the back bedroom of the Jackson Home before one of the marches.
We hope that everyone will at some point have an opportunity to visit the Jackson Home in Greenfield Village and experience this important civil rights history.
