Rosa Parks home in Berlin. (Photo by Fabia Mendoza)
Last summer, Ryan Mendoza, an American-born artist living in Berlin, deconstructed the three-bedroom home at 2672 S. Deacon St. in Southwest Detroit where the civil rights icon lived. He then shipped it to Berlin, where it was put back together to display on his property.
Now, Mendoza says he'd like to see the home return 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,” Mendoza tells Frank Witsil of the Detroit Free Press. “There are very, very few monuments to the civil rights movement, which is antithetical to that.”
But, Mendoza tells the paper Detroit's cultural institutions, to date, have shown little interest in the house, so it may end up in a museum or venue elsewhere in the U.S. — such as Washington, D.C., or New York.
All sorts of folks have seen the home in Berlin, including ninth graders at the Isaac-Newton School in Berlin, who wrote Mayor Mike Duggan earlier this year to ask why the city didn't keep a piece of African American history.
"I don't understand how you could give it away -- it belongs to Detroit! I would be happy to get an answer from you," writes Dustin Schulter in an April 27 letter.
John Roach, a spokesman for Duggan, told Deadline Detroit in an email at the time:
The decision to let Ryan Mendoza have this house was made solely by the Rosa Parks Foundation, which owned the house at that time. It had purchased the home from the Detroit Land Bank, which felt it was appropriate for the Rosa Parks Foundation to be the owners of the home in which Ms. Parks lived for a period of time."
