In This Home

A Symbol of Courage and Strategy

Relocated from Selma, Alabama, and opening in Greenfield Village in June 2026, the Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson Home comes to The Henry Ford with inspiring stories of resilience, family, community and activism.

Now more than 100 years old, the Jackson Home is both a family home and one of several important landmarks of Selma's role in the Long Civil Rights Movement. By opening their home to their close friend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies as a place to rest and strategize, the Jackson family helped shape the Voting Rights Movement and advance the passage of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

From the Jackson Home's living room, key moments of the Selma Voting Rights Movement were planned, including the Selma to Montgomery marches and the Voting Rights Act. Hundreds of people came through the home, including Nobel Peace Prize winners, international dignitaries, media representatives, and activists and supporters of Civil Rights for all.

In Greenfield Village, the Jackson Home will be restored to 1965 ─ a landmark year in the fight for civil and voting rights that included the Selma to Montgomery marches, President Lyndon Johnson's iconic "We Shall Overcome" speech, the signing of the Voting Rights Act and other pivotal moments of activism.

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. King 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, visitors 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, in an unassuming family home, world-changing ideas, plans and actions charged the air with hope:

• In this home, 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 home, Dr. King worked, slept and strategized, along with key allies, for months before the Selma to Montgomery marches.
• In this home, 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 home, Dr. King and others watched, electrified, as Johnson made a nationally televised address to Congress introducing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, proclaiming “We shall overcome.”
• In this home, the only known meeting between the first and second Black men to receive the Nobel Peace Prize took place — Dr. King and Dr. Ralph Bunche.
• In this home, several generations of Black dentists, teachers and professionals used their connections and success to build up the Black community of Selma.