Listen Live
WOLB Featured Video
CLOSE

The home where civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks once lived has been on a global journey. After being shipped from Detroit to Berlin to undergo reconstruction, the house has been brought back to America and is slated to be auctioned off, CNN reported.

Parks and her family initially moved into the Detroit home in 1957 after she received death threats in the South for refusing to give up her seat on a bus, the news outlet writes. She lived in the home with her husband, brother, sister-in-law, and her thirteen nieces and nephews.

Decades after she lived there, the structure of the home started to deteriorate and it was going to be demolished, however, her loved ones and other preservationists stepped in to have it conserved. Rhea McCauley, Parks’ niece, had the home shipped to Berlin so that artist Ryan Mendoza could reconstruct it and share Parks’ legacy with the city. The home was supposed to be featured in an upcoming exhibit at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island but the institution is no longer including it.

The historic structure is slated to be auctioned off by Guernsey’s Auction in New York. It’s believed to be worth millions of dollars. “This (house) is unquestionably a historical place of significance. It’s certainly worth millions of dollars,” Arlan Ettinger, President of Guernsey’s Auction House, told CNN. The auction house has sold other items that belonged to Parks which had a value of nearly $5 million. Half of the funds from the home will go to the Rosa Parks Family Foundation.

The house will be sold amongst hundreds of other artifacts and mementos that are connected to Black history and culture including the manuscript of Alex Haley‘s The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

SEE ALSO:

Rosa Parks: Remembering Her Resilience, Resistance In The Face Of Racism

Rosa Parks’ Historic Home To Return To The US

Home Where Rosa Parks Once Lived To Be Auctioned Off  was originally published on newsone.com