Museums are facing pressure to minimize artifacts that explain American history from a Black perspective.
Brick by brick, beam by beam and shingle by shingle, a house where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others planned marches in support of Black voting rights in the Deep South has been trucked from Alabama to a museum near Detroit.
The intricate operation to move and preserve the Jackson Home and other artifacts from the Civil Rights era preceded President Donald Trump’s efforts to eradicate what he calls “divisive” and “race-centered ideologies,” and minimize the cultural and historical impact of race, racism and Black Americans.
Trump’s purges have sought to remove all reference to diversity, equity and inclusion from the federal government and workforce, and many private companies have followed suit. The establishments that house some of the most important reminders of African American history — including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. — have come under particular pressure.
The chief executive of the Henry Ford, the new location of the Jackson Home, insists the museum has no political agenda.
“The Henry Ford’s work is focusing on good, factual public history,” Patricia Mooradian told The Associated Press.The Jackson Home
King was often at the home of Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Jackson in Selma, Alabama, during the pivotal years of the Civil Rights Movement in the early ’60s. It was within the walls of the 3,000-square-foot bungalow that King and others strategized a series of peaceful marches from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, that helped usher in the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Jawana Jackson told AP in 2023 that she decided to ask the Henry Ford — a history museum complex in Dearborn, Michigan — to relocate and preserve her parents’ house and its contents because she believes “ the house belonged to the world.”
The building was taken apart and carried the more than 1,000 miles to be reconstructed in Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford, and archivists are digitizing and cataloging some 6,000 items contained within. They illustrate the movement’s efforts to seek equal rights despite the often violent response of angry mobs and the police.
