Shared Legacies Enabled These Walls to Speak: The Jackson Home and its move from Selma to Dearborn

Great history happened here—in the more-than-century-old home of Dr. Sullivan Jackson and Mrs. Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson. Built in 1912, in its early African American luminaries W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington visited and held fireside chats there.

Five decades later, in 1965, the home again became a crossroad of history. Leaders of the Civil Right Movement convened within its walls to plan the Selma-to-Montgomery Voting Right March - work that would contribute directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Two Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Dr. Ralph Bunche and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stayed in the Jackson home during those pivotal days.

In 2015, the Jackson home again emerged centerstage as our documentary Shared Legacies captured interviews with Dr. Susannah Heschel, Dr. Clarence Jones, Rabbi Everette Gendler and Jawanna Jackson.  As Selma celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery march, Spill the Honey preserved the stories nurtured in that sacred space.

In 2026, the Jackson home will begin a new chapter. In 2025, it was moved to Greenfield Village at The Henry Ford Museum and in mid-2026, it will open for visitors from across the nation to learn about the essential role this home played in shaping Civil Rights history. 

“If these walls could talk”, is an expression uttered as people yearn to learn the rich history of an historic or infamous site.

Thanks to our Shared Legacies documentary, the walls of the Jackson home can and do speak to the proud history that happened here.