Where in the world is Rosa Parks House?

[sheshe2]

An Artist Rebuilt and Preserved Rosa Parks’s Home. Now That It Failed to Sell at Auction, Its Fate Hangs in the Balance

The humble monument to the Civil Rights movement could be saved by a university, a foundation, or a pair of Detroit businessmen.



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It has been a grueling month for Ryan Mendoza, the Berlin-based American artist who helped save the little wooden structure by reconstructing it in the German capital last year. But Mendoza is staying positive. He hopes that Parks’s house, which failed to meet its $1 million reserve when it went to auction at Guernsey’s, will ultimately become a national monument to the civil rights movement somewhere in the US. “Rosa Parks is having a teaching moment, once again, through this house,” he says.

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The Rosa Parks House, which was owned by her brother, had been languishing in an abandoned state and was on the City of Detroit’s demolition list when Parks’s niece, Rhea McCauley, stepped in and bought her childhood home from the city for $500 in 2014 with the hope of restoring it. Located in Southwest Detroit, the house, which was built in 1936, would become an example of the kind of overcrowded living conditions many African Americans experienced at that time, especially when fleeing the South: Parks lived there with McCauley and 16 other family members in the late 1950s. After taking ownership of the home, Parks’s niece enlisted Mendoza’s help, who took it apart and resurrected it on his property in the German capital.

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“The unsung story behind the Rosa Parks House is one of redlining, housing inequality, and its persistent effects on millions of Americans today,” Mendoza says, referring to racial segregation of neighborhoods. “From Brooklyn to Oakland, with pen in hand, 80 years ago, city planners mapped out where Blacks would live.” Mendoza sees a connection between the segregated planning of inner cities in postwar America and Germany in the 1930s. “These were, in reality, ghettos, comparable to the ones created in Germany,” he says.



Mendoza explains that Parks’s home was in a “redlined” neighborhood of Detroit, which was demarcated as less valuable. His goal with the project is multifaceted, but, above all, he wants to give this chapter of Parks’s story proper value. Back in the late 1950s during the time Parks stayed at the home, residents—a majority of whom were African American—had less access to essential goods and services, from banking and healthcare to supermarkets. The otherwise unremarkable two-story building, he says, is a symbol of the systemic discrimination against African Americans through racist zoning laws. It was yet another form of segregation that Parks fought valiantly throughout her life, most famously when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955.

After McCauley gifted the house to Mendoza in the summer of 2017, he disassembled it by hand, so that he could take it to Germany as part of what he calls “The Rosa Parks House Project.” Packing and shipping cost the artist around $13,000. “America will have to show that they really care about her legacy,” McCauley told Fox 2 last year as the house headed off to voluntary exile in Germany.



More https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rosa-parks-house-auction-1327121

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It is home, well almost. It is on display in Rhode Island.

Ryan Mendoza’s art installation “The Rosa Parks House Project” is on exhibition at the WaterFire Arts Center





Thanks to support from a number of beneficiaries including WaterFire Providence and the Nash Family Foundation along with a wide outpouring of public support from members of the Providence community, the Detroit house Rosa Parks had taken refuge in after the tumultuous 1955 bus boycott has returned home to America. Ryan Mendoza’s “The Rosa Parks House Project” is an art installation that honors Rosa Parks and the struggles she faced due to her courageous leadership in the civil rights movement. The artwork was created with the support of the nieces and nephews of Rosa Parks and includes recreations of remembered details of her stay with them in that house.

The house, formerly owned by Rosa McCauley Parks’ only sibling Sylvester McCauley, speaks to issues of the centrality of family connection in the African American experience, of the Great Migration, of segregation, of red lining, of faulty mortgages and the housing crisis, of misogyny, as well as of the marginalization of black oral history. The McCauley family living in this house was the reason and hope that lead Rosa to move from the south to Detroit. Rhea McCauley repurchased the house back from the Detroit demolition lists in 2016 to honor Rosa Parks and to preserve the evidence of the precarious struggle of Rosa Parks to keep a roof over her head in the “Northern promised land that wasn’t.” Rhea entrusted the house and its message about Parks to the artist Ryan Mendoza, who had to move the house to Berlin and back, to accomplish his goals.

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“We believe in art and its capacity to advance the public discourse about important subjects. We stepped up when there was a danger of the house returning to Berlin unseen. We could not allow artist’s voices and black voices to be silenced. We need more discussion about race in America.” -Barnaby Evans, WaterFire Providence’s Executive Artistic Director

More https://artscenter.waterfire.org/rosa-parks-house-project/

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THIS!


“There are 1,500 monuments to the Confederacy, which is absurd,” Mendoza says. “There are 76 monuments to the civil rights movement. Let this be the 77th.”

[PoliticAverse]

1. The "Rosa Parks bus" on the other hand...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/04/19/150970124/photo-president-obama-sits-in-rosa-parks-bus