text: Skip in Skip x Embed x Share CLOSE Artist Ryan Mendoza saved Rosa Parks' old Detroit home from demolition by moving it to Germany. Now, he explains why he wants to return the house to America. Video by By Frank Witsil, DFP. Wochit 
   
   Artist Ryan Mendoza poses in front of the rebuilt house of Rosa Parks in Berlin on April 6, 2017. (Photo: Markus Schreiber, Associated Press) 
   
   DETROIT — The American artist who saved a Detroit home that civil rights icon Rosa Parks once lived in by moving it to Germany last year now wants to bring it back to Detroit. 
   
   “If you look at the current situation in America, you have all of these monuments to the Confederacy — which are monuments to slavery,” the 45-year-old artist, Ryan Mendoza, said in an interview Sunday with the Detroit Free Press. “There are very, very few monuments to the civil rights movement, which is antithetical to that.” 
   
   But, Mendoza said, Detroit's cultural institutions, so far, have shown little interest in bringing the house back. Instead, the house may likely end up in a museum or venue elsewhere in the U.S. — such as Washington, D.C., or New York. 
   
   The artist, who lives in Germany, said it is time for Parks' home to return to the U.S. as communities here debate what should happen to Confederate monuments and memorials, and some fear that white nationalism is on the rise. 
   
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   More: Artist brings new beginning for Rosa Parks' Detroit home 
   
   In the aftermath of the deadly clash in Charlottesville, Va., and plans for more rallies, there is a sense that moving the home back to America could serve as a reminder of what Parks — and others — went through in their fight for more justice and equality. 
   
   From the beginning, Mendoza said he planned to showcase Parks' rebuilt home in Europe — and then return it to the U.S. 
   
   About a year ago, the dilapidated home on South Deacon Street faced demolition, but its facade was removed so it could be shipped to Europe and refashioned into artwork and put on display in Berlin to give people a more intimate sense of who Parks was. 
   
   Rosa Parks is shown during her 90th birthday celebration with family and friends Feb. 13, 2003, in Detroit. (Photo: Detroit Free Press) 
   
   Parks, a soft-spoken seamstress, became an international civil rights icon after being arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala. 
   
   The bus — No. 2857, which was assigned to the Cleveland Avenue route — has been restored and is now at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. 
   
   “Her memory, her legacy will never die,” Rhea McCauley said last year of Parks, her aunt, as the home facade was being packed up and sent to Mendoza's Berlin studio. “It is an important lesson for the entire country.” 
   
   So far, Mendoza said, one foundation, the Nash Family Foundation, based in New York, has committed up to $40,000 to ship it back to the U.S., and dozens of museums he has contacted have been receptive to his appeals to display it. 
   
   Mendoza said he has spent more than $130,000, much of that from the sale of his other artwork, to disassemble, move and rebuild the small home, which is about 21 feet wide and 21 feet long. He's now working on the home's interior. 
   
   In addition to foundation and museum support, Mendoza said, the vice chancellor of Germany, Sigmar Gabriel, who visited the house about a month ago, is helping to champion his efforts to return the house to the U.S. 
   
   Mendoza said the German official even wrote a letter to former first lady Michelle Obama. It is significant that Parks' former Detroit home found a place of honor in a country whose leaders once supported a belief in a master race and practiced genocide. 
   
   Berlin, the German capital, has been the backdrop for important speeches. President John F. Kennedy gave his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" address and President Ronald Reagan implored Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," referring to the Berlin Wall. 
   
   There also is a Rosa Parks school in Berlin, as well as a Martin Luther King school and kindergarten. King visited the divided city in 1964, giving speeches to crowds on both sides of the Berlin Wall. 
   
   In Berlin, Mendoza said that the house has been visited by thousands of people, including some American celebrities. 
   
   Rhea McCauley, family member of Rosa Parks, listens to a speaker at an event outside of Rosa Parks' old home in Detroit on Sunday, Sept. 25, 2016. (Photo: Nate Smallwood, Detroit Free Press) 
   
   Parks left the South in 1957 and came to Detroit to stay with family. She first settled at the home on South Deacon Street, McCauley said, adding she was one of 13 children and other relatives who also lived there. 
   
   Parks later moved to a home on Wildemere on the city's west side. In 1994, she was assaulted and robbed by an intruder. She then moved to an apartment in Riverfront Towers in downtown where she lived until her death in 2005. 
   
   In 2010, the Deacon Street home had fallen into disrepair. The city issued a demolition order. 
   
   The Rosa Parks Family Foundation, founded by McCauley, bought the house on South Deacon Street in November 2014 for $500 from the Detroit Land Bank Authority with the hopes of restoring it. 
   
   Mendoza, a painter from New York who moved to Europe at 20, learned about the Parks house through McCauley after he worked on the "The White House" project, in which he dismantled an abandoned house in Detroit and re-created it in Europe as artwork. 
   
   That project, however, also angered some of the people who lived near the home's crumbling remains, which stood for six months after the facade was stripped off. That house, near 8 Mile and Livernois, was eventually demolished. 
   
   Mendoza said the Parks' home is something that should be remembered. 
   
   ”I brought it out of context so it could be made visible,” he said. "As an artist, you have to put a spotlight on something so it can be made visible." 
   
   Contributing: The Associated Press. Follow Frank Witsil on Twitter: @fwitsil 
   
   Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2xhcSXG ||||| Rosa Parks’ House, Now in Germany, Looks to Come Home 
   
   When Rosa Parks’ old home was threatened to be demolished, Ryan Mendoza paid to have it taken down and shipped to Germany. He’s now trying to find a new home for this home, back in the U.S.
target: – Last year, an American artist living in Germany bought Rosa Parks' dilapidated home in Detroit and reassembled it in Berlin as an art project. Now Ryan Mendoza says it's time for the home to return to the US, per the Detroit Free Press. He cites the recent racial violence in Virginia and the rippling effects of the removal of Confederate statues around the US, making the case that Parks' home would provide a powerful counterpoint. "There are very, very few monuments to the civil rights movement," he tells the Free Press. The big hitch, however, is getting someone, or some institution, to pay for its relocation. Mendoza says that Detroit's cultural institutions don't seem interested, raising the prospect that the home could end up in a museum elsewhere in the country. So far, one group—the Nash Family Foundation in New York—has pledged up to $40,000, but while other institutions have expressed interest in displaying the 21-by-21-foot-long home, actual monetary offers aren't following. Mendoza says he's spent about $130,000 to move and restore the house, though the interior work isn't yet complete. "I'm fond of the house," he tells NBC News, "but this house has to go back to the United States, and now is the time." (The late founder of Little Caesar's quietly paid Parks' rent for years.)