Rosa Parks’ House Display in Italy Offer Glimpse into US Racial Tension

NAPLES, KOMPAS.com - The home of US civil rights icon Rosa Parks is on display in Italy raising fresh relevance in wake of unceasing racial tensions in America.

The run-down, paint-chipped Detroit house where Rosa Parks took refuge after her historic bus boycott is now sitting in the central courtyard of the Royal Palace in Naples.

Italy is the latest stop for the house in a years-long saga that began after the 2008 global financial crisis.

Parks’ niece saved the tiny two-story home from demolition in Detroit and later donated it to an American artist who took it apart and rebuilt it.

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The rebuilt house was first on public display in Germany before landing in Italy. The house failed to find a permanent resting place in its homeland of the US.

As racial tensions seethe across the Atlantic, the exhibition of the home starting Tuesday has taken on fresh relevance.

The display is being accompanied by a repeating soundtrack entitled “8:46” and lasting that long.

It's the original time prosecutors said it took for a Black man, George Floyd, to be killed by white police officers in a May slaying that has fueled the Black Lives Matter movement and protests around the nation in a reckoning with America’s history of slavery and racial injustice.

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Minnesota prosecutors later acknowledged the police officer had his knee on Floyd's neck for seven minutes, 46 seconds, but said the one minute difference didn't affect the case.

Artist Ryan Mendoza has been campaigning for more than five years to draw attention to the historic value of the home, where Parks lived for a short time after her 1955 defining act of defiance: refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama.

The yearlong refusal of African Americans to ride city buses that followed is regarded as the first major US demonstration against segregation.

In an interview ahead of the opening, Mendoza said he hoped the grandeur of the Naples debut of “Almost Home" would draw attention to Parks’ legacy and help America “remember a house it didn’t know it had forgotten”.

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