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Author Event - Dr. Derek G. Handley

MPL hosts an evening with Dr. Derek G. Handley, author of Struggle for the City: Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement, and an Assistant Professor of English at UWM.

MPL is thrilled to host Dr. Derek G. Handley, author of Struggle for the City: Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement, released in November 2024. In this book, Dr. 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 - attempted to protect their communities from urban renewal and enacted a new form of citizenship to fight for their neighborhoods. This event is co-sponsored by Boswell Books Company, and copies of Struggle for the City will be available to purchase from Boswell at the event.

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. In his research, Dr. Handley examines Black newspapers, archival documents from Black organizations, and oral histories of community advocates, showing how African American residents fight for their neighborhoods and communities. 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.

Dr. Derek G. Handley is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at UWM. He is also affiliated faculty in the African Diaspora Studies Department and in the Urban Studies program.

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