Artist: U.S. needs Rosa Parks’ home

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 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,” artist Ryan Mendoza, 45, 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.”

Mendoza said Detroit’s cultural institutions have shown little interest in bringing the house back. Instead, the house probably will end up in a museum or venue elsewhere in the USA — such as Washington or New York.

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

From the beginning, Mendoza said he planned to showcase Parks’ home in Europe — then return it to the USA.

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, has been restored and is at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

Mendoza said the Nash Family Foundation, based in New York, committed up to $40,000 to ship the dwelling back, and dozens of museums he has contacted have been receptive to his appeals to display it.

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

Mendoza said the house has been visited by thousands of people in Berlin.

MARKUS SCHREIBER, AP Artist Ryan Mendoza wants to bring Rosa Parks’ house (background) back to the USA from Berlin.