Draft by Draft: The Making of The House by the Side of the Road
Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson at desk. / Photo feature in Black Belt Living, April 2012
Before starting my role as the Processing Archivist for the Jackson Home in 2024 — which would soon find me processing the papers, photographs, and other 2D materials of the Jackson family — I sought out an accessible entry point to serve as my introduction. In the weeks before my start date, I turned to Richie Jean Sherrod Jackson’s memoir, The House by the Side of the Road: The Selma Civil Rights Movement. A swift, engaging read, the book is approachable and informative, detailing Richie Jean's diverse experiences of her upbringing in both the South and the nation’s capital before settling back in Selma, Alabama, and raising a family. Interwoven with her and her family’s personal narratives are stories of the national figures we know and recognize, portraying their individual personalities as well as highlighting the critical roles they played in the Movement as the events of 1965 unfolded in Alabama and across the country.
After reading such an intimate, impactful account, it should not have come as a surprise to me when I began parsing through her papers that Richie Jean had saved so many of her previous drafts. Across some 30 documents, Richie Jean preserved not only the Jacksons’ experience of the events leading up to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but much of the materials showcasing her writing process as well. As I pored over the collection, I was struck by the ease with which her handwritten notes and outlines flowed into typed drafts with edits in a familiar red pen – a hallmark of many a teacher not to be missed by this lifelong educator.
A section of Richie Jean’s favorite poem, Sam Walter Foss’s “The House by the Side of the Road,” intercut with her own verses. / Photo by Staff of The Henry Ford
In dating these documents, we can see that decades passed before the Jacksons began to consider how they would tell their story. One of their earliest creative explorations centers on the 1897 poem for which the book was eventually named: “The House by the Side of the Road” by American poet and librarian, Sam Walter Foss. Here, Richie Jean penned new lines, providing geographic specificity to replace the piece's vaguer verses — lines that better represent her home and the hospitality she provided.
Richie Jean’s draft for a movie or television program based on her life story, 1997. / Photo by Staff of The Henry Ford
Another instance included a premise, structure, and storyline on Richie Jean’s life were it to be adapted for a TV program or movie, featuring a motif of an empty basket slowly filled with ribbons — collecting a ribbon for each influential figure in her life.
But by 1997, we find the project would take its final form as a book, capturing the history of what went on in their home. Richie Jean wrote out details for events and key figures on dozens of subject notecards as the memories of that time came back to her. Text from these notecards often made its way verbatim into early drafts, as she organized her thoughts into one cohesive narrative. It’s from this point that we see the largest leap in time between materials — the manuscripts jump ahead by a decade from 1999 to 2009 before a date is noted again on a draft.
Richie Jean kept copies of all print and email correspondence with her publisher, the University of Alabama Press, beginning in 2007, when she shared her latest manuscript for their consideration. In 2008, the editing process began in earnest, and drafts were tweaked and trimmed as additional perspectives weighed in. Most of the manuscripts in the collection are from this period — roughly 2008 to 2010—as edited drafts were shipped back and forth between their offices in Tuscaloosa and the Jackson home in Selma. Drafts would implement styling changes for consistency, swap one turn of phrase for another, and eventually plug in the final pieces of front matter: title page, table of contents, dedication, acknowledgements, and copyright.
The opening chapter of The House by the Side of the Road, with text remaining consistent from its original handwritten notecard, to an early typed manuscript page, and the final manuscript. / Photo by Staff of The Henry Ford.
The publication of The House by the Side of the Road in 2011 was the culmination of years of effort. So what drove Richie Jean to write it?
The Jacksons had been interviewed many times over the years on their role hosting leaders of the Movement in Selma, but they never sought to leverage those relationships into positioning themselves as leaders and activists. It was only as they saw more and more inconsistencies across other retellings of the history they lived that they were prompted to share their own firsthand account. The cover of The House by the Side of the Road, featuring a photo of daughter Jawana Jackson sitting on the lap of Martin Luther King Jr., made their perspective on the matter abundantly clear — to them, “Uncle Martin” was a friend of the family first, and a national figure second.
The 2015 paperback edition of The House by the Side of the Road alongside the 1965 image featured on its cover of Jawana Jackson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. / Photo by Staff of The Henry Ford.
The Jackson family’s story shines a spotlight on ordinary people playing a small role in extraordinary moments in history and reminds us of the impact we all can have as well. As Richie Jean writes, “We cannot all be a Martin Luther King Jr., but each and every one of us can make a positive difference in the lives of our families and the people we meet each day. For you see the dream is still alive.”
Jack Schmitt is a Processing Archivist at The Henry Ford.
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