Overview
- The Henry Ford formally opened the reconstructed Jackson House at Greenfield Village with a ceremonial ribbon-cutting attended by several hundred people and family members including Jawana Jackson.
- Jawana Jackson first contacted the museum in 2022, the museum bought the home in 2023, crews dismantled it piece by piece and trucked it more than 800 miles to Dearborn for careful reassembly.
- The house is interpreted as a site where Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders planned the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches and where King watched President Lyndon B. Johnson announce the bill that became the Voting Rights Act.
- Original belongings were moved with the house, including the chair King sat in, and museum leaders and family members explicitly link the exhibit to recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that have weakened portions of the Voting Rights Act; Jawana Jackson said, “We are still trying to protect democracy.”
- The project reflects a family-museum partnership intended to preserve material history, teach visitors about civil rights organizing, and keep conversation about voting access and legal protections in the public eye.