sheshe2

sheshe2's Journal

June 29, 2019

Where in the world is Rosa Parks House?

An Artist Rebuilt and Preserved Rosa Parks’s Home. Now That It Failed to Sell at Auction, Its Fate Hangs in the Balance

The humble monument to the Civil Rights movement could be saved by a university, a foundation, or a pair of Detroit businessmen.

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It has been a grueling month for Ryan Mendoza, the Berlin-based American artist who helped save the little wooden structure by reconstructing it in the German capital last year. But Mendoza is staying positive. He hopes that Parks’s house, which failed to meet its $1 million reserve when it went to auction at Guernsey’s, will ultimately become a national monument to the civil rights movement somewhere in the US. “Rosa Parks is having a teaching moment, once again, through this house,” he says.

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The Rosa Parks House, which was owned by her brother, had been languishing in an abandoned state and was on the City of Detroit’s demolition list when Parks’s niece, Rhea McCauley, stepped in and bought her childhood home from the city for $500 in 2014 with the hope of restoring it. Located in Southwest Detroit, the house, which was built in 1936, would become an example of the kind of overcrowded living conditions many African Americans experienced at that time, especially when fleeing the South: Parks lived there with McCauley and 16 other family members in the late 1950s. After taking ownership of the home, Parks’s niece enlisted Mendoza’s help, who took it apart and resurrected it on his property in the German capital.

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“The unsung story behind the Rosa Parks House is one of redlining, housing inequality, and its persistent effects on millions of Americans today,” Mendoza says, referring to racial segregation of neighborhoods. “From Brooklyn to Oakland, with pen in hand, 80 years ago, city planners mapped out where Blacks would live.” Mendoza sees a connection between the segregated planning of inner cities in postwar America and Germany in the 1930s. “These were, in reality, ghettos, comparable to the ones created in Germany,” he says.

Mendoza explains that Parks’s home was in a “redlined” neighborhood of Detroit, which was demarcated as less valuable. His goal with the project is multifaceted, but, above all, he wants to give this chapter of Parks’s story proper value. Back in the late 1950s during the time Parks stayed at the home, residents—a majority of whom were African American—had less access to essential goods and services, from banking and healthcare to supermarkets. The otherwise unremarkable two-story building, he says, is a symbol of the systemic discrimination against African Americans through racist zoning laws. It was yet another form of segregation that Parks fought valiantly throughout her life, most famously when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955.

After McCauley gifted the house to Mendoza in the summer of 2017, he disassembled it by hand, so that he could take it to Germany as part of what he calls “The Rosa Parks House Project.” Packing and shipping cost the artist around $13,000. “America will have to show that they really care about her legacy,” McCauley told Fox 2 last year as the house headed off to voluntary exile in Germany.

More https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rosa-parks-house-auction-1327121

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It is home, well almost. It is on display in Rhode Island.

Ryan Mendoza’s art installation “The Rosa Parks House Project” is on exhibition at the WaterFire Arts Center

Thanks to support from a number of beneficiaries including WaterFire Providence and the Nash Family Foundation along with a wide outpouring of public support from members of the Providence community, the Detroit house Rosa Parks had taken refuge in after the tumultuous 1955 bus boycott has returned home to America. Ryan Mendoza’s “The Rosa Parks House Project” is an art installation that honors Rosa Parks and the struggles she faced due to her courageous leadership in the civil rights movement. The artwork was created with the support of the nieces and nephews of Rosa Parks and includes recreations of remembered details of her stay with them in that house.

The house, formerly owned by Rosa McCauley Parks’ only sibling Sylvester McCauley, speaks to issues of the centrality of family connection in the African American experience, of the Great Migration, of segregation, of red lining, of faulty mortgages and the housing crisis, of misogyny, as well as of the marginalization of black oral history. The McCauley family living in this house was the reason and hope that lead Rosa to move from the south to Detroit. Rhea McCauley repurchased the house back from the Detroit demolition lists in 2016 to honor Rosa Parks and to preserve the evidence of the precarious struggle of Rosa Parks to keep a roof over her head in the “Northern promised land that wasn’t.” Rhea entrusted the house and its message about Parks to the artist Ryan Mendoza, who had to move the house to Berlin and back, to accomplish his goals.

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“We believe in art and its capacity to advance the public discourse about important subjects. We stepped up when there was a danger of the house returning to Berlin unseen. We could not allow artist’s voices and black voices to be silenced. We need more discussion about race in America.” -Barnaby Evans, WaterFire Providence’s Executive Artistic Director

More https://artscenter.waterfire.org/rosa-parks-house-project/

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THIS!

“There are 1,500 monuments to the Confederacy, which is absurd,” Mendoza says. “There are 76 monuments to the civil rights movement. Let this be the 77th.”

June 16, 2019

In a few hours it will be Fathers Day.

I don't have one to celebrate with. I miss him.

My Father. He slipped quietly away from me early morning 11/09/2014. Alzheimer.

You?

June 15, 2019

Barack Obama's 12 most memorable speeches; KU expert discusses outgoing president's rhetorical legac

The most inspirational speaker of our time. I included the video of his keynote speech at the DNC. That is where he caught my attention and held it all these years.

I only high-lighted a few, you can find the rest of them here:

https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2017/jan/09/barack-obamas-12-most-memorable-speeches/

“It’s just much harder to present a complicated message to the American people,” Rowland said.

Obama, however, will be better remembered for his usually inspirational speeches, Rowland said. Here are his 12 most important addresses, along with some key highlights, according to Rowland:

• Jan. 8, 2008 — New Hampshire primary concession speech. Obama said, “In the unlikely story of America, there has never been anything false about hope,” and used the refrain “Yes, we can.”

• Aug. 28, 2008 — Acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. Rowland called it “the story of America gradually becoming more welcoming and inclusive … he talks about the evolution of the American dream.”

• March 7, 2015 — Civil rights march anniversary speech at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

The Speech that Made Obama President

June 14, 2019

The Reality Of How America Was Built.

http://all-hat-no-cattle.blogspot.com/2019/06/president-trump-likens-melania-trump-to.html

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- Cool give me a hand up, will ya?

-I got up here myself, why can't you?

I saw this toon a few years ago and in fact have been looking for it on and off for a long time. Then boom, here it is.

Nothing says racism more than this image. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

June 14, 2019

CNN: Trump just compared Melania to Jackie O.

Header: We have our own Jackie O... her name is Melania T.

Loose quote.

June 13, 2019

The Vietnam War generation grew up to be 'THE ESTABLISHMENT'

The ESTABLISHMENT Generation that is today villified as old & in the way, were the generation of 18 yr olds that were given little choice in fighting a jungle war so few were prepared for.
They were Drafted.

This came on the heels of a generation of young men & women who also knew war & did more than beat each other up on social media for the fact of war.
They defeated Hitler's Nazi spread.

The fact of war has always been a threat for every generation & some were never given the option of fighting it directly, or from a computer screen in front of their TV.

THE ESTABLISHMENT Generation today so mocked & degraded by the young voters today, were also 18 when War was all around them.

A reminder of history is in order
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VIETNAM
The dates used by the Associated Press for official U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War are August 1964 (the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) to January 1973 (the Paris Peace Accords), although U.S. military activities and intervention in Vietnam spanned from 1955 to 1975.

The role of the United States in the Vietnam War began after World War II and escalated into full commitment during the Vietnam War from 1955 to 1973. The U.S. involvement in South Vietnam stemmed from 20 long years of political and economic action.

Since there was no declaration of the war, exact dates are sketchy. However, it is now widely accepted that the Vietnam War started on November 1, 1955 and lasted until April 30, 1975, which is roughly 20 years, or 19 years, 180 days to be precise.

Maybe this will garner some respect from those who screech ESTABLISHMENT who were given little choice in being sent to a jungle war.

www.google.com/amp/s/www.history.com/.amp/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-timeline

"Vietnam War Timeline"
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Some education is in order.
From Vietnam as 18 yr olds, to the Middle East as they grew to middle age, This dreadful 'ESTABLISHMENT' generation has known war their entire lives.

June 11, 2019