In This Home

The Jackson Home 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.

In this home, people will learn how a committed group of idealists — some famous, some obscure — worked together to advance American principles and bring liberty, justice and rights within the reach of all Americans. Their struggles, and their successes, are a powerful part of America's story.

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.
• This house is one of several places where the Selma movement was planned. This home was central to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference/MLK planning.
• In this house Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. worked, slept and strategized, along with key allies, for months before the Montgomery march.
• In this house Dr. 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 Dr. 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.”
• In this house, the only known meeting between the first and second Black men to receive the Nobel Peace Prize took place — Dr. Ralph Bunche and Dr. King.
• This house was home to several generations of Black dentists, teachers, and professionals, who used their connections and success to build up the Black community of Selma.