Rosa Parks house in Berlin has a ticket home to U.S.
LONDON — In a backyard in Berlin, a ramshackle house that was once a haven for civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks is preparing for its third life — back in the United States.
It had almost been lost to history, falling into blight, abuse and foreclosure in Detroit. But in 2016, American artist Ryan Mendoza shipped the dismantled facade in two containers to his home in Germany.
There, it was restored as an art exhibit in his garden in the Wedding neighborhood. The and itinerant journey of the wood-frame house took another turn recently, when a member of the Nash Family Foundation, based in Manitowoc, Wisc., formally agreed to pay for its passage back.
“I never wanted to rebuild it in my backyard,” Mendoza said by phone from Berlin. “But I wanted to protect it.”
“It’s time for the house to return home,” he added. “It’s needed for people to have another major point of reference for how to treat each other with dignity. This will be a marker on the ground.”
While the house has a ticket back to America, the question of where it would find a permanent home remains unanswered.
The hurdles seem huge, the logistics daunting, but calls and emails have gone out for help to institutions including Brown University in Rhode Island, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and the Brooklyn Museum, among others, Mendoza said.
At least two institutions — Brown and Wright — said they were seriously considering the project.
“The house has a symbolic importance — it’s important in the narrative of her life,” said James Nash, a board member and the driving force behind the foundation’s pledge. “She suffered for a huge act of courage. It should be here, not in Berlin.”
Mendoza, who lives in Germany with his wife, Fabia, a fellow artist and filmmaker, and their young son, said it’s important now more than ever to repatriate the house to the United States, a nation convulsing from deep racial and social wounds.
“I’ve been out of the U.S. for 25 years, and I’m looking at it through a telescope,” he said. “I’m seeing a dark time in our history.”
He said the house would be a necessary addition to the comparatively sparse number of monuments dedicated to the civil rights movement. Mendoza envisions a temporary exhibition at first. To him, the house is a totem of tolerance, embodying the woman who “changed the world” by saying no.
In 1955, Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Ala., sparking a seminal bus boycott. After she received death threats, Parks sought the safety of her brother’s house at 2672 South Deacon St. in 1957.
She arrived “homeless and penniless,” her niece Rhea McCauley, who is nearly 70, recalled. “She literally started her life over when she came to the city of Detroit. She was blacklisted.”
The three-bedroom house cocooned a whopping 17 people at the time, McCauley said by phone from Detroit. Her aunt stayed there for two years, finding some measure of peace. Parks died in 2005, at age 92, in Detroit.