Rosa Parks house: Dispute threatens bitter end to homecoming
It has been a long, strange journey for the small clapboard house where civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks once lived - from Detroit, Michigan, to Providence, Rhode Island, via Berlin.
The house now sits half-rebuilt in an old factory in Providence, where it is at the centre of a bitter dispute between members of Parks's family, an American artist, and an institute Parks co-founded.
According to family members and others, the house was the first port of call for Parks after she fled death threats in her home state of Alabama. It was 1957, two years after she had refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white person, sparking a bus boycott that became a touchstone of the civil rights movement.
The house at 2672 South Deacon Street, Detroit, belonged to Parks's brother Sylvester McCauley. Parks's niece Rhea McCauley, who was five at the time, recalled "Auntie Rosa" arriving from Alabama and staying for two years.
"There would have been 17 or 18 people in the house then," said Ms McCauley, now 70. "There was so many of us the house had to be sparse. We sat around the table at mealtimes and said grace. I remember Auntie Rosa as quiet. She was gone a lot, she would leave early in the morning to go look for work."
At some point, the house fell out of the family's ownership and into foreclosure and disrepair, like so many others in Detroit. Two years ago, Ms McCauley bought it for $500 to save it from demolition, and an American artist, Ryan Mendoza, stepped to help preserve it, eventually shipping it back to display it at his home in Berlin.
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