- The Selma, Alabama home that served as a sanctuary and strategic hub for Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

during the 1960s is now on display at Greenfield Village in Dearborn.

The Jackson Home is the newest addition to the Henry Ford's collection of exhibits that showcase important moments in our history.

Bridge Detroit's Michael Walker spoke with the president and CEO of the Henry Ford, Patricia Mooradian, and the curator of Black History, Amber Mitchell, about acquiring and restoring this house.

- [Micah] The Jackson Home was a planning site for the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

Leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., visited the home in Selma, Alabama, organizing the fight for voting rights.

- Dr.

Sullivan and his wife, Mrs.

Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson, opened up the doors to their home in '65 for the movement towards voting rights in the United States.

And so the work that they did in '65, really providing a place of respite, hospitality, a safe place for movement makers to lay their head.

The Jacksons had been longtime friends with Reverend Dr.

King since their wives were childhood friends, but they had also been an undercurrent of movement making all throughout Selma and really across the south, really starting in the early 1900s and leading up to a really more intense time in the 1960s.

And so as the Jacksons become closer to understanding what was going on and how their role needed play out, they decided that they would take a great personal risk.

And that is welcoming Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

into their home as well as other members of the movement.

The Jackson's home is one of many epicenters in the city of Selma and across the Alabama Black Belt of folks who took on great personal risks to make sure that all of us had access to the voting rights that are promised to us as American citizens.

- [Micah] The Henry Ford president and CEO, Patricia Mooradian, shares why Jackson's daughter reached out to the museum.

- In February of 2022, Joanna approached us pretty much out of the blue and asked if she could explain to us why this house was so significant.

And so she told us the importance of this house on a virtual call.

She had had this house in her own possession since her parents passed away, and she was trying to run it as a museum for about 10 years.

As she started to think about the future, the significance of this home, she was concerned about where it would end up since she is an only child and has no heirs of her own.

And so she was looking for a place for the house to go and exist and be cared for in perpetuity.

So she did a lot of research and a lot of homework.

She knew that we had Greenfield Village, and that Greenfield Village was a place where we preserved and restored significant structures that tell stories that people can immerse themselves in.

And so at the end of that call, she basically said, "Patricia, this house belongs in Greenfield Village," and that's when all our work began.

- [Micah] Amber Mitchell, the museum's curator of Black history, worked closely with Joanna Jackson throughout the project, hearing stories about her childhood home and the people who would visit.

- I always sit in awe of Ms.

Joanna as I work with her, work in consultation with her, have gotten to know her very closely over the last several years, over the course of this project is, you know, always understanding there is always something new to learn.

I think one of my favorite aspects of working with Ms.

Joanna is thinking about a person like Dr.

Martin Luther King Jr.

who, for me, you know, is this big 3,000 foot tall figure.

He's larger than life, right?

But for her, that's her Uncle Martin, right?

That's her Uncle Martin that shared cookies and bribed her with cookies and had tea parties with her and was really this human being.

And so what I'm really excited to bring out in this exhibition is the humanity of our movement makers.

That these are not only just folks who took on a role that was necessary, but they were also parents, siblings, children themselves.

- What was the process like of transporting the Jackson home from Selma?

- Oh my gosh, oh boy.

The process of restoring this home, the process of deciding whether it could be moved took us about 14 months from that call.

We had to see if it was structurally sound, if it could withstand a move, then we had to figure out how to move it.

The house came with all of its contents, and those contents were significant.

The family saved everything that Dr.

Martin Luther King touched, the chair he sat in, the dining room table he ate in, the beds he slept in, the pajamas he wore.

They saved it all.

And so that was going to be moved with the house.

What was determined is that the house, all the extraneous parts, the roof, the chimney, the porch would all be taken off so that it was down to a core box.

That box of the home would be cut in half and basically wrapped and put onto a especially built cradle on the back of a wide load flatbed.

And we took it up to Michigan in two trips.

And then, of course, the roof and the chimney and the porch all went separately.

- [Micah] This is the Henry Ford's first major home acquisition in 40 years.

Why was this so important to bring the Jackson home here to the museum?

- The idea of moving a home or moving a building is not really best practice anymore as far as historic preservation goes.

However, in our case, in working closely with Joanna Jackson, we realized that we had an opportunity to help preserve an important piece of American history, one that could potentially have been lost to environmental or financial or economic outcomes.

And so, for us, it was critically important to not only just bring this home here, but to have it in perpetuity, meaning that forever, as long as the Henry Ford exists, that home will be taken care of and protected.

I think, as an organization, it was also really important for us to put our money where our mouth was in terms of preserving African American history.

As curator of Black history, I started with this project, and it allows me to also dig into additional stories of African American history that touch all aspects of the Henry Ford's collections, now, in the past, and in the future.

- [Narrator] Mooradian and Mitchell also shared what the process was like of rebuilding the Jackson home and remodeling it so that the house looks like the way it used to back in the 1960s.

- We wanted to make sure that everything that was integral to that home, that basically the walls told a story.

So we wanted everything to be preserved.

And so it took a lot of care and historic structure specialists to know how to put it together in the most authentic way.

The other thing, though, we had to think about was the fact that the home had been in Selma, Alabama, which has way different weather conditions than Michigan.

So we had to make sure that it could withstand the winters here.

And so we had to put in different kinds of heating and cooling systems and also make sure that, with the numbers of people that would be coming through the home, that the house would be sturdy enough to withstand repeated traffic through the house.

- And then you have over 8,000 artifacts that you brought up from Selma that were in the house.

What has it been like with you and your team going through those items and making the house look like it did in the '60s?

- You know, it has been a really interesting project to take a home that had been lived in over 100 years.

It's built in 1919, designed by Wallace Rayfield, who is the second licensed Black architect in the United States.

And it has three generations of Black teachers and Black dentists who lived in this home.

And so, in doing the detective work to try and reverse that, right, to go from when we acquired it in 2023 to the way it looked in 1965, has been a really interesting labor of literally physically pulling up carpet, pulling off drywall to find the things up underneath, and really do that sort of historical detective work, but also going through archives to see this very well-documented and well-photographed home that people don't know is this home, right?

As far as the restoration of the home and pulling back these things, like we mentioned, the family hung on to everything.

That was a priority for them.

And honestly, I wish there were more folks who would hang on to everything that their family had, but it was a priority for them.

So it made it a little bit easier for us to be able to have these really critical pieces, like Dr.

King's chair, the chair he was sitting in as they all watched the speech given on March 15, 1965, the "We Shall Overcome" speech by LBJ.

That's already there.

All we have to do is make sure that it's conserved, make sure that it's stable enough to be out on the floor of the exhibition when it opens, right?

But there are other smaller things that we also had to do some digging for, right, where we had to find the correct television to make sure that that's historically accurate.

We had to look for some of these smaller pieces that might have been lost to time, like certain vases and other things that may have been gotten rid of.

We also have worked very closely, again, with Joanna to get her own reminiscences about what was her mom's taste, what did she like.

Her taste versus the previous owner's taste, very different, so that we can literally see in layers on the walls of the home who was living here and when, right?

So that allows us to put together an awesome timeline and to be able to better understand what life was like for this family in particular, and what were the tastes of these ladies who lived in the home, who really left an imprint on not only just the family, but really the magnitude of the Voting Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.