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Berlin gives refuge to Rosa Parks’ Detroit house

Rosa Parks fled the American South for Detroit in the 1950s at the height of her civil rights struggle. Now the house where she sought asylum has itself found refuge in a city an ocean away: Berlin.

Published: 6 April 2017 09:03 CEST
Berlin gives refuge to Rosa Parks' Detroit house
Photo: Tobias Schwarz / AFP.

US artist Ryan Mendoza, who is based in the German capital, helped rescue the dilapidated two-storey structure from the wrecking ball and rebuilt it board by board in his garden. This week he will invite the public to have a look.

Mendoza, 45, says the house's odyssey holds up a mirror to two societies: his bitterly divided homeland grappling with the rise of President Donald Trump, and Germany, where more than a million people fleeing war and misery have sought asylum in the last two years.

“By disregarding this house, the United States has shown a disregard for civil rights,” Mendoza said, as he gave AFP a preview of the reconstructed clapboard structure in the city's ethnically diverse Wedding district.

“Civil rights are not just important for black people but also for white people who want to differentiate themselves from their racist forefathers. The Germans completely understand what this house has to say.”

Having lived in Europe for more than two decades, Mendoza said Berlin's earnest reckoning with its own dark history as well as a mood of “love and tolerance” made it the right haven for the house.

“Maybe it's not a coincidence that the city that is now taking into refuge this house is a city born out of a wall being broken down, and the country that is so intent on building a wall up is the country that has lost this house,” he said.

Forced to flee

Parks, an African-American seamstress, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1st 1955, triggering a wave of ultimately successful protests against racial segregation.

She became a hero of the international civil rights movement but relentless death threats in the South forced her to escape to Detroit, then a booming industrial city and a symbol of the American Dream.

Mendoza said the modest three-bedroom home at 2672 South Deacon Street housed 17 people – her brother's family – at the time Parks lived there, between 1957 and 1959. She never moved back to Alabama, and died in Detroit in 2005 at the age of 92.

Battered by floods and break-ins, the blighted house eventually ended up on the city's long demolition list.

Parks' niece Rhea McCauley, a retired artist, bought it back for $500 but was unable to raise the funds to restore it.

 Enter Mendoza and his wife Fabia, who had already transposed one Detroit house to Europe as part of an art project probing themes of rootlessness and displacement. They said they have become the “foster parents” of the Parks house.

McCauley, 69, said she is grateful to the Mendozas and is sure Parks herself would have approved of the move to Berlin.

“I love them for what they're doing for my aunt. Not very many people would have stepped up to the plate and, trust me, nobody did here in the United States,” she told AFP by telephone from Michigan.

'Not ready for Rosa'

Mendoza said he used the proceeds of paintings he sold to foot the $33,000-bill to deconstruct and transport the house.

Getting it across the Atlantic was a “very dangerous project”, he said.

“The chimney was listing and the back wall was very damaged and the floors were sagging,” he said.

Mendoza took the house apart over 18 days last August, packed it in shipping containers and gradually pieced it back together on a foundation he poured between his contemporary home and his studio.

He will showcase it for guests on Saturday, and again on the city's Gallery Weekend art festival April 28th-30th.

McCauley will fly to Germany for the open house and the premiere of a documentary about the project by Fabia, a Berlin native.

Visitors will not be able to enter the house but Mendoza will illuminate it from the inside and play 1950s-era music and news clips that Parks might have heard.

He has consciously left the traces of its long neglect, including its peeling paint. He said he is holding the house “hostage” until it can return to its rightful place in Detroit, with its “dignity restored”.

Mendoza has sought help from public and private US institutions as well as former first lady Michelle Obama, thus far without success.

“Here we have a house that is priceless, worth more than any waterfront villa that you can imagine,” Mendoza said.

“I would like to see it here for as short a time as possible. I totally love this house but this is not my house. I'm trying to give back as much as possible.”

However McCauley, who said she is alarmed and angered by the direction her country is taking under Trump, prefers the house stay in Berlin for a bit longer.

“The United States itself with the politicking and the disregard for human life – they're not ready for Auntie Rosa. I would have to wait until this country grows up.”

By Deborah Cole

ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

Published: 8 July 2023 10:13 CEST
African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

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