Berlin to give refuge to Rosa Parks' Detroit House Rosa Parks fled the American South for Detroit in the 1950s at the height of her civil rights struggle. Parks, an African-American seamstress, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, triggering a wave of ultimately successful protests against racial segregation. Now the house where she sought asylum has itself found refuge in a city an ocean away: Berlin.