HOMING IN ON HISTORY
Feud over auction of Detroit house billed as former home of Rosa Parks
It’s been billed as the home where Rosa Parks sought refuge after fleeing the Deep South following the momentous bus boycott she helped ignite.
The tiny Detroit house, which was rebuilt by an American artist, is expected to fetch millions when it goes up for auction in New York next month.
But the home is now sheltering a controversy over whether Parks ever actually lived there.
The Detroit nonprofit organization she co-founded says no.
A lawyer for the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development has sent Guernsey’s auction house a cease-and-desist letter demanding a halt to the sale slated for July 26.
The institute claims Parks was a mere visitor to the two-story, wood-frame home where her brother Sylvester McCauley lived with his wife and their 13 children.
“Mrs. Parks’ lodgings during her long residency in Detroit are well known and do not include the McCauley family home,” wrote lawyer Steven Cohen.
Cohen alleges that Parks’ family overstated her connection to the house in a bid to profit off the name of the late civil rights hero.
“They (Parks’ nieces and nephews) often try to trade on their aunt’s family name in a way that isn’t truthful,” Cohen told the Daily News. “This is a very important civil rights leader and icon, and her story should not be altered in a way that’s not true.”
Guernsey’s president, Arlan Ettinger, isn’t backing down. He sharply dismissed the claim that Parks only visited the house.
“There’s an abundance of evidence indicating that she stayed in this house,” Ettinger said. “If the question is — did she live there? — I don’t know how you define ‘lived’ as opposed to ‘stayed.’ She certainly stayed in it. This has been something studied by very prominent organizations.”
Many of Parks’ surviving relatives, meanwhile, say they are sure the 23-by-23foot Colonial-style home was their aunt’s first stop after fleeing to Detroit to escape threats of violence.
Rhea McCauley, one of her nieces, said she has no doubt that Parks lived in her childhood home.
“I was just 4 or 5 years old,” said McCauley, 70, who saved the house from demolition. “One day, she wasn’t there. And the next day, she showed up. It was Auntie Rosa, her mother and Uncle (Raymond) Parks.”
McCauley bristled at the institute’s suggestion that the family was exaggerating her aunt’s relationship to the house.
“I have no idea why they continue saying these things about my family,” McCauley added. “I feel sorry for them.” *** The bitter back-and-forth represents the latest skirmish in the more than decade-long legal battle between the institute and Parks’ soccer team-sized cadre of nieces and nephews.
The dispute began as a feud over Parks’ estate after her death 13 years ago.
“It’s a mess,” said Michigan-based lawyer Lawrence Pepper, who represents Parks’ relatives. “A lot of grief, a lot of time, a lot of everything.”
Parks, who had no children, selected two people to manage her estate — a retired judge and her longtime caregiver Elaine Steele, with whom she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self-Development.
Parks’ nieces and nephews went to court, accusing Steele of manipulating their dementia-stricken aunt into cutting them out of her will. They demanded to share in the proceeds from Parks’ estate.
The two sides ultimately reached a settlement, with the cash from an estate sale split 80% to the institute and 20% to the family members.
The collection of Parks’ possessions was purchased by Howard Buffett, the son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, for $4.5 million in 2014. He donated the items to the Library of Congress.
But the two sides are still fighting over a homemade wool coat that Parks may have worn on the December day in 1955 when she famously refused to give her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala.
The jacket was appraised — sight unseen — at a value of more than $1 million.
Her family members agreed to turn over the coat when they reached a settlement deal with the institute.
But Parks’ nieces and nephews, who initially said one of them was in possession of it, later insisted they’d made a mistake. They have since contended that the coat’s whereabouts — if it ever existed at all — are unknown.
“The existence of such a coat appears to be myth and urban legend,” Lawrence Pepper, the lawyer representing the nieces and nephews, wrote in a recent court brief.
Peppers told The News he longs for the day the legal quagmire will finally come to an end. “It’s been trying for everybody,” he said. *** Like the estate battle, it’s been a long and twisted journey — figuratively and literally — for the tiny house that’s now the subject of controversy in New York.
The story begins in 1957, two years after Parks’ courageous stand gave rise to the modern civil rights movement.
Hounded by death threats, Parks and her husband headed North with her mother.
Where they first settled in Detroit is now in dispute.
In a book about her aunt, one of Parks’ nieces described the moment the trio showed up at the front door of the family home on South Deacon St.
“It was a great reunion, with the understanding that we would have five adults and nine children crammed into a three-bedroom, onebathroom house,” Sheila McCauley Keys wrote in “Our Auntie Rosa,” published in 2015.
““There’s always room for family’ is what Father said.”
Parks told a slightly different story. In her 1992 autobiography, she wrote that her brother rented her an apart- ment on Euclid Ave. when she first arrived in Detroit.
“My mother and I moved in there,” she wrote in “Rosa Parks: My Story.”
Complicating matters further, other family members said Parks first settled in a different home altogether: one on Fleming St. that belonged to her first cousin Thomas Williamson.
“When she first came, she stayed with us,” said Williamson’s daughter Carolyn Green, who was about 13 in 1957. “It was only a couple of weeks before they found her a place to stay.”
Green said it wasn’t possible for Parks to have slept in the tiny, cramped home belonging to her brother.
“She might have visited, but she did not sleep there,” added Green. “When you think about it — 13 kids, a husband and a wife, three bedrooms — where would she sleep?”
Parks was living at an apartment complex along the Detroit River when she died in October 2005 at age 92.
By then, the house on South Deacon St. had been lost to foreclosure.
Rhea McCauley purchased it for $500.
She reached out to organizations seeking a partner in preserving the home, but came up empty.
Out of options, she donated it to an American artist who was living in Germany.
The artist, Ryan Mendoza, carefully dismantled the house in 2016 before shipping it to Berlin.
After restoring the structure plank by plank, he put it on display — drawing students, government officials and even boxing legend George Foreman.
Mendoza shipped it back across the Atlantic earlier this year.
The house will remain in its deconstructed form while it goes up for auction along with such artifacts as the Jackson 5's first recording contract and a note written by Parks describing her first encounter with Martin Luther King Jr.
The lawyer for the institute says he may go to court to ask a federal judge to intervene.
Assuming the sale of the house goes forward, the proceeds will be split between Rhea McCauley and Ryan Mendoza.
McCauley said she hopes that whoever buys it will have “Auntie Rosa's spirit.”
“As long as there's love, as long as there's safety, as long as they care about Auntie Rosa's legacy, that's the most we can hope for,” she said.
“This house is not about me. It's not about the institute,” she added. “The greater story is more important than the institute people or myself.”