Detroit House Preserves Memories of a Little-Known Part of Rosa Parks’s Life | The New York Times 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.

“The idea was to repurpose the home and turn it into a work of art,” said Rhea McCauley, Ms. Parks’ niece, who helped arrange the project.

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W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most important African-American activists during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the NAACP and supported Pan-Africanism.

Scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois was born on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. In 1895, he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Du Bois wrote extensively and was the best known spokesperson for African-American rights during the first half of the 20th century. He co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Du Bois died in Ghana in 1963. (Biography.com).