Civil rights activist’s former home was facing demolition as family members were unable to raise funds for its preservation

The Detroit home of civil rights activist Rosa Parks has been dismantled and moved across the Atlantic by a Berlin-based artist after it faced demolition in its original location.

The facade of the two-storey building, home to Parks in the 1950s and 60s, was shipped from the US to Germany last month, after having been donated by one of her relatives to Ryan Mendoza, an American artist based in the German capital.

Members of Parks’ family had in past years repeatedly failed to raise funds for the building’s preservation.

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Over the next three months Mendoza will try to reconstruct the building at his studio in Berlin’s Wedding district, after which it could tour galleries around Europe in an attempt to raise awareness of its neglected existence in America.

“I hope either President Obama or his successor will be sensitive to this issue and catch word of the house that is held hostage across the world: a monument to Rosa Parks’ legacy that was purposely kidnapped in order for America to recognise what it has lost,” Mendoza told the Guardian.

The 44-year-old artist said he was evaluating offers from major institutions. “The Tate Modern might be a good place to discuss the state of American affairs with this house as its centrepiece, but I feel eventually the Rosa Parks’ house should be rebuilt on the lawn in front of the White House.”

Parks’ refusal to surrender her bus seat to a white person in December 1955 is one of the most famous moments in the history of the modern civil rights movement in America. Her ensuing arrest triggered the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, a successful protest campaign against Alabama’s racial segregation policies.

In 2012 Obama marked the anniversary of Parks’ protest with a picture of himself on the same seat inside the National City Lines bus number 2857, now on display at Detroit’s Henry Ford museum.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rosa Parks’ Detroit home in 1955. Photograph: Rhea McCauley

Parks moved into the modest three-bedroom house on South Deacon Street in Detroit’s south-west after fleeing Alabama because of the death threats she continued to receive after the end of the boycott. She remained in the city until her death in 2009. Though relatives say she considered her new home a refuge, she remained vocal in her criticism of the city’s housing segregation practices and participated in the 1963 Detroit Walk to Freedom.

The house was later sold to a new owner, who was dispossessed after Detroit’s housing bubble burst around 2007-2008. Badly damaged by floods and with pipework missing after break-ins, the property was put on the city’s demolition list until one of its former inhabitants, Parks’ niece Rhea McCauley, bought the house back from the council for $500 (£390). When her parents bought the building in 1956, she said, they had paid $8,000.

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McCauley approached Mendoza after hearing about a similar project the artist had organised in Detroit. “She loved the city, but I don’t think the city loved her very much back,” McCauley recently told Detroit Free Press. “This house should have been preserved here. But we live in a world where every other project takes precedence.”

A New Yorker who has lived and worked in Europe for over 20 years, Mendoza had gained attention in the city for a series of controversial projects. Earlier this year, he moved a family house from Detroit’s low-income 8 Mile Road area into a permanent exhibition at the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium. In another provocative project, Mendoza restyled two abandoned Detroit homes so that light shining through bullet holes at night displayed the names of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Mendoza’s work brings to mind that of the influential late US artist Mike Kelley, who in 2012 built a faithful mobile replica of his Detroit childhood home.

Mendoza said he wanted to “make the building into a work of art without violating the building as a document”.



While he described himself as an “imperfect candidate” for the project and said “it should be somebody in the black community doing this”, he argued that McCauley and he had had a simple choice between the building being preserved or demolished. The final remains of the house were pulled down at a ceremony attended by the local community, including the last surviving neighbour from Parks’ time.

McCauley said she hoped young people in Europe would look at the house and let it strengthen their spirit. “If a small little lady can fight for justice until the end of her life, what is wrong with the rest of us?”