Artist wants Rosa Parks' home returned to U.S.

DETROIT — The American artist who saved a Detroit home that civil rights icon Rosa Parks once lived in by moving it to Germany last year now wants to bring it back to Detroit.

“If you look at the current situation in America, you have all of these monuments to the Confederacy — which are monuments to slavery,” the 45-year-old artist, Ryan Mendoza, said in an interview Sunday with the Detroit Free

Press. “There are very, very few monuments to the civil rights movement, which is antithetical to that.”

But, Mendoza said, Detroit's cultural institutions, so far, have shown little interest in bringing the house back. Instead, the house may likely end up in a museum or venue elsewhere in the U.S. — such as Washington, D.C., or New York.

The artist, who lives in Germany, said it is time for Parks' home to return to the U.S. as communities here debate what should happen to Confederate monuments and memorials, and some fear that white nationalism is on the rise.

In the aftermath of the deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va., and plans for more rallies, there is a sense that moving the home back to America could serve as a reminder of what Parks — and others — went through in their fight for more justice and equality.

From the beginning, Mendoza said he planned to showcase Parks' rebuilt home in Europe — and then return it to the U.S.

About a year ago, the dilapidated home on South Deacon Street faced demolition, but its facade was removed so it could be shipped to Europe and refashioned into artwork and put on display in Berlin to give people a more intimate sense of who Parks was.

Parks, a soft-spoken seamstress, became an international civil rights icon after being arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala.

The bus — No. 2857, which was assigned to the Cleveland Avenue route — has been restored and is now at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

“Her memory, her legacy will never die,” Rhea McCauley said last year of Parks, her aunt, as the home facade was being packed up and sent to Mendoza's Berlin studio. “It is an important lesson for the entire country.”

So far, Mendoza said, one foundation, the Nash Family Foundation, based in New York, has committed up to $40,000 to ship it back to the U.S

Mendoza said he has spent more than $130,000, much of that from the sale of his other artwork, to disassemble, move and rebuild the small home, which is about 21 feet wide and 21 feet long. He's now working on the home's interior.

Parks left the South in 1957 and came to Detroit to stay with family. She first settled at the home on South Deacon Street, McCauley said, adding she was one of 13 children and other relatives who also lived there.

Parks later moved to a home on Wildemere on the city's west side. In 1994, she was assaulted and robbed by an intruder. She then moved to an apartment in Riverfront Towers in downtown where she lived until her death in 2005.

In 2010, the Deacon Street home had fallen into disrepair.

The city issued a demolition order.

The Rosa Parks Family Foundation, founded by McCauley, bought the house on South Deacon Street in November 2014 for $500 from the Detroit Land Bank Authority with the hopes of restoring it.