Meeting Place of Civil Rights Leaders Has New Home at Henry Ford Museum

The Henry Ford Museum moved the Jackson Home from Selma to Dearborn. The museum is planned to open next summer. Photo: Samuel Robinson

Martin Luther King Jr., who turned a middle class Black family’s home in Selma, Alabama, into a hub for Civil Rights Era planning and strategy, once came to the steps of that home all by himself.

The house was a meeting place King’s staff and local leaders. Typically the reverend would come to the house accompanied by a cluster of young staffers.

But this time, he was alone.

“I am so tired, and your house is the only place I could think of where I can be left alone, get some sleep, and be by myself to think,” King told the late Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson, she writes in her book, “The House by the Side of the Road.”

She lived at the house with her husb