Africana Distinguished Lecture Series presents Derek G. Handley
The urban renewal policies of the 1950s and 1960s 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.” This presentation discusses how African American residents in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the Bronzeville neighborhood of Milwaukee, and the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul enacted Black Rhetorical Citizenship to fight for their communities. By centering the residents in their own narratives of displacement, this presentation demonstrates how local organizers, leaders, and residents used rhetorics of placemaking, community organizing, and critical memory to resist the bulldozing visions of urban renewal.
Derek G. Handley is an associate professor in the English Department, affiliated faculty in African and African Diaspora Studies department, and affiliated faculty in the Urban Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before arriving at UWM, Derek taught in the English Department at Lehigh University and was an affiliate of Africana Studies. He was a Chamberlain Project Fellow in English and Black Studies at Amherst College, and a Mellon Fellow at the James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference at Emory University. Currently he’s the co-director of the Mapping Racism and Resistance research project, which comprehensively maps racial covenants and uncovers Black resistance to such discrimination.
