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Last summer, Ryan Mendoza, an American-born artist living in Berlin, deconstructed a three-bedroom home at 2672 S. Deacon St. in southwest Detroit where the civil rights icon Rosa Parks once lived. He then shipped it to Berlin where it was put back together and put on display on his property in the Wedding District of the city.
But all along, he felt its rightful home was America.
Rosa Parks being fingerprinted in 1956 (Wikimedia Commons)
Now, the home is expected to return to the states, thanks to the help of a member of the Nash Family Foundation, based in Manitowoc, Wis., who agreed to give $45,000 for its passage back to America,.
The first stop is expected to be Providence, R.I., where Brown University is ironing out final arrangements to have the house on display for three months in Spring 2018 at the WaterFire Arts Providence, about a 20 minute drive from campus.
After that, Mendoza says it could end up permanently back in Detroit where the The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in midtown Detroit has expressed strong interest. It could also end up down south.
Barrymore Bogues, a Brown University professor of Africana Studies, who heads the school's Center for Slavery and Justice, and is spearheading the effort in Rhode Island, says the arrangement hasn't been formalized but it's in the process.
He said the house has great significance.
"It’s really extraordinarily important at this point and time, with the United States' current history," he said, particularly, with the issue of "race once again at the forefront of American society."
Mendoza says he is grateful the home is returning to America.
"How wonderful is it that you can put it on display for university students to sharpen their senses and gain the whole context of the story of the civil rights movement. This house is like a bomb underneath an increasing number of toppling Confederate statues."
Rhea McCauley, Rosa Park's niece and president of the Rosa Parks Family Foundation, was only a few years old in the 1950s, living in the Deacon Street home with 12 other siblings and her parents, when aunt Rosa Parks, her husband Raymond Parks and Rosa's mother, Leona, moved from Alabama into the house.
It was 1957 and they stayed there for about two years before getting their own home, McCauley told Deadline Detroit in an interview last year.
The vacant, run-down house eventually landed on the city's demolition list. McCauley paid $500 of her own money to the Detroit Land Bank Authority to take it off the list. She then tried to find an organization to preserve it.
She says she went to such organizations as the NAACP and Motor City Blight Busters, but had no luck. That's when she turned Mendoza, who took up the cause.
"The purpose of the family foundation is to assure that the house will be restored," she said at the time. "I am protecting and prolonging her legacy."
Parks died in Detroit of natural causes at age 92 on Oct. 24, 2005.
