Struggle for the City

An Open Access edition of Struggle for the City is available through PSU Press Unlocked. To access this free electronic edition click here. Print editions are also available.

The urban renewal policies stemming from the 1954 Housing Act and 1956 Highway Act destroyed the economic centers of many Black neighborhoods in the United States. Struggle for the City recovers the agency and solidarity of African American residents confronting this diagnosis of “blight” in northern cities in the 1950s and 1960s.

Examining Black newspapers, archival documents from Black organizations, and oral histories of community advocates, Derek G. Handley shows how African American residents in three communities—the Hill district of Pittsburgh, the Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee, and the Rondo district of St. Paul—enacted a new form of citizenship to fight for their neighborhoods. Dubbing this the “Black Rhetorical Citizenship,” a nod to the integral role of language and other symbolic means in the Black Freedom Movement, Handley situates citizenship as both a site of resistance and a mode of public engagement that cannot be divorced from race and the effects of racism. Through this framework, Struggle for the City demonstrates how local organizers, leaders, and residents used rhetorics of placemaking, community organizing, and critical memory to resist the bulldozing visions of urban renewal.

By showing how African American residents built political community at the local level and by centering the residents in their own narratives of displacement, Handley recovers strategies of resistance that continue to influence the actions of the Black Freedom Movement, including Black Lives Matter.

“Not only does Derek Handley present a compelling account—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hopeful—of local communities fighting for their survival against forces of racial and economic inequality and control, he provides fresh perspectives on key concepts like publicity and citizenship that warrant serious scholarly reflection. This book is a must read for anyone hoping to understand historical and contemporary challenges to and opportunities for enacting vibrant, democratic public worlds.”—Robert Asen, author of School Choice and the Betrayal of Democracy: How Market-Based Education Reform Fails Our Communities

“This important project shifts attention from the well-documented activities of the southern Civil Rights Movement to the rhetorical agency and initiatives of those struggling against so-called ‘urban renewal and redevelopment,’ leading to the ultimate displacement of black communities in three midwestern communities. After a cohesive comparison of each community’s use of rhetorical actions, the author closes with a discussion of how these struggles have been critically memorialized and thereby established as permanent inspirations for future generations.”—Shirley Logan, author of Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America

“Through extensive research and a careful attention to rhetoric, Struggle for the City reframes our understanding of urban renewal by focusing on the strategies of response developed by Black neighbors and organizers to confront and resist the systematic dismantlement of Black communities as well as to remember the social and physical bonds that held these neighborhoods together in the wake of state-sponsored displacement and destruction.”—Adrienne Brown, author of The Residential Is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership

Derek G. Handley is Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is also affiliated faculty in the African Diaspora Studies Department and in the Urban Studies program.

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

African American Studies

Communication Studies

           Rhetorical Studies

           Political

History

           U.S.

           Twentieth-century

Rhetoric

Critical Race Studies

Africana Studies