Detroit House Preserves Memories of a Little-Known Part of Rosa Parks’s Life

When Rosa Parks stayed there in the late 1950s, the house on South Deacon Street in southwest Detroit was modest — two stories high, with white shutters and a chimney peeking from the top.

In recent years, it suffered the same fate as thousands of other houses in blight-stricken Detroit: abandoned, ransacked by thieves looking for scrap metal and inhabited by only a few friendly raccoons. In September, it was demolished.

Yet there may be an afterlife for one of Ms. Parks’s former homes. The house’s materials have been shipped to an artist in Berlin, who wants to reconstruct the house to honor Ms. Parks’s life and her extraordinary role in the civil rights movement.