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

Parks lived in the tiny house in Detroit with her brother and his family as she struggled to make a new life for herself in the northern US after receiving death threats following the bus protest.

The family says Parks, who died in 2005, lived there with 17 other relatives.

The house was abandoned and slated for demolition after the financial crisis in 2008 and Detroit’s dramatic decline, but Parks’ niece, Rhea McCauley, bought it from the city for $500 and donated it to Mendoza.

After unsuccessful efforts to persuade the city to help save the building, Mendoza in 2016 dismantled it and moved it to the German capital, rebuilding it on the lot of his studio for public display.

In 2018, Brown University announced it would feature the house as part of a planned exhibition on the civil rights movement organized by its Center for Slavery and Justice.

But it backed out at the last minute, citing a legal dispute with the family.

Earlier this year, Mendoza approached the Naples-based Morra Greco Foundation, where he had worked for a year in the 1990s.

The Foundation agreed to help organize the exhibit with the backing of the Italian culture ministry and Campania regional government.

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For Mendoza, the house epitomizes the experience of many African Americans who migrated north in the last century, only to face redlining and other discrimination that has affected generations of Black Americans.

“This house, in a word, is a way for people to understand why people in America are so enraged,” he said.

He takes particular satisfaction that the house, which is “so fragile that you can almost blow it over,” is being exhibited in the central courtyard of a royal palace, where it certainly would have never found welcome by the kings of the House of Bourbon.

But now, “instead of being rejected by the walls of the royal palace, it’s embraced and protected by these walls,” he said.

“Potentially thanks to the showing of the house in this way, America will allow the house to have a home.” 

(Writers: Nicole Winfield, Gregorio Borgia) 

Source: https://apnews.com/066448cf0660e2daff689cc7a536bc9f