A small house in Alabama with close ties to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is being moved to Dearborn. The home in Selma where Dr. King planned those historic marches will become part of Greenfield Village.
The Jackson House will be joining the likes of other historic buildings here, such as the courthouse where President Abraham Lincoln practiced law before eventually signing the Emancipation Proclamation.
“When we announced it this morning, you could feel the energy in the room,” said President and CEO of The Henry Ford Museum, Patricia Mooradian. “There’s a lot of excitement from our team members and from other community leaders that we shared this story with.”
Greenfield Village at The Henry Ford Museum will soon be the final resting place for the home where Dr. King planned the historic march from Selma to Montgomery to advocate for Black voting rights in the Jim Crow era.
“This home was a safe haven for Dr. King and his colleagues,” Mooradian said. “During that time, it was often unsafe to stay in motels and hotels, so they sought safe haven inside of people’s homes.”
Mooradian says the Jacksons were great friends with Dr. King, and their house will be dismantled one piece at a time and driven to Dearborn, where it will be placed back together again.
That’s nearly 1,000 miles, 800 to be exact. Three thousand square feet that will be reassembled to be exactly the same inside and out.
“One of the primary things that’s so significant is that the family that used to live there maintained the contents and the way it was in 1965,” Mooradian said. “So part of this acquisition includes all of the contents of this house.”
In that home, Dr. King also heard the world was changing in the form of a bill that would eventually become the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, introduced by President Lyndon B Johnson.
“All these stories will be part of what we tell when the home is reassembled in Greenfield village,” Mooradian said.
The Jackson House should be in Michigan by the end of the year, but reassembling and installing the home in Greenfield Village will take years—still, quite the exciting announcement of what’s to come.