e.polis Fall 2025
Book Review
Struggle for the City: Citizenship and Resistance in the Black Freedom Movement
by Derek G. Handley, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024, 204 pages
Reviewed by Russell Jacob Star-Lack, M.S.-MLIS Student, Urban Studies & Library and Information Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
UWM rhetorician Derek Handley’s Struggle for the City is a compelling intervention in the literature on urban renewal and the resistance it engendered. More than just uncovering forgotten, localized aspects of this opposition, Handley’s monograph persuasively makes the case for urban scholars to analyze the rhetoric generated by marginalized communities as not only a reflection of the views of these communities but also as an exercise of their agency and power. Handley’s exploration and theorization of this agency make Struggle for the City all the more urgent.
Struggle for the City charts the rhetorical history of resistance to urban renewal by the Black Freedom Movement across three mid-sized northern cities: Pittsburgh, St. Paul, and Milwaukee. Drawing on local mainstream and Black newspapers, Handley argues that the opposition to urban renewal by these cities’ African American communities can best be understood using his framework of Black Rhetorical Citizenship (BRC). BRC views the actions of African American communities resisting urban renewal as a process of civic engagement where these communities used everyday acts to argue for their right to be heard on issues threatening their communities.
By creating alternative maps and “rhetorical spaces,” forming organizations and networks to stop or modify the most harmful elements of freeway construction, lobbying to end the segregated housing market, and sponsoring educational forums, Black communities asserted their right to the “full citizenship” automatically enjoyed by their white counterparts. While none of the neighborhoods chronicled in Struggle for the City survived urban renewal unscathed, Handley argues that the resistance and rhetoric of their residents continues to inform Black activism through critical memory, exemplifying successful and unsuccessful strategies to contest white supremacy. It also serves as a reminder of what is at stake when anti-Black violence goes unopposed.
Handley’s BRC model is a significant contribution to the study of African American activism in the humanities and social sciences. One of the most notable aspects of this model is its implications for our understanding of the relationship between urban space, discourse, and power. Throughout its narrative, Struggle for the City illustrates that the dialectic between Black communities and the actors steering urban renewal hinged on how racialized spaces are imagined and valued, as well as who gets to make those determinations.
These dynamics are what make a monument like Pittsburgh’s Freedom Corner so resonant. Marked by a billboard reading, “Attention: City Hall and U.R.A. No Redevelopment Beyond This Point!” this space served a site for protests against urban renewal during the 1960s while drawing a physical and rhetorical boundary insulating Pittsburgh’s majority Black Hill District from further violence and encroachment. Handley demonstrates that such strategies discursively reconstituted targeted neighborhoods according to the vision of their defenders, rather than that of the hegemonic “master narrative” that portrayed Black neighborhoods as blighted and valueless.
Scholarship across multiple fields has keyed into the discursive dynamics surrounding placemaking before, including sociologist Mario Luis Small’s neighborhood frames model, Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and hysteresis, and Deborah Martin’s theory of “place-framing,” along with the relational and Black placemaking models cited by Handley. Struggle for the City’s innovation in this literature is to read neighborhood narratives generated by Black communities in terms of collective power and agency. By creating counternarratives for their neighborhoods in their articulation of Black Rhetorical Citizenship, these communities were also claiming and exercising the agency denied to them by white supremacy. This is best illustrated in Handley’s chapter on Milwaukee, where the local Black Freedom Movement used reciprocal leadership forums to educate their community on how to fight urban renewal. Doing so, according to Handley, allowed the movement to “distribute” the agency to contest state-sponsored violence across the community, contributing to multiple civil rights victories in education and housing throughout the 1960s. This finding is valuable for understanding how grassroots movements both past and present are able to mobilize successfully against more powerful opponents.
Handley’s conception of rhetorical agency as a means to protect and reimagine marginalized spaces mirrors political scientist Clarence Stone’s idea of “power to,” where power in urban politics manifests in the ability of actors to collectively achieve a shared goal. According to both theories, the placemaking rhetoric of communities threatened by urban renewal served as a valuable source of power, enabling the diverse forms of resistance documented in Struggle for the City. Such a reading has significant implications for the study of urban activism.
Where this monograph occasionally falters has to do with to its structure as a case study of three distinct histories. The necessities of condensing what could be a book-length narrative into a single chapter means that important events related to Handley’s analysis must be left out. For instance, the monograph’s discussion of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood omits that in 1962, during the construction of the I-94 freeway through Rondo and a half decade after the neighborhood’s leaders’ campaign for open housing, Minnesota became one of the earliest states to pass a fair housing law. The contributions of Rondo’s residents to this achievement remains an open question, and an exploration of this question could rewrite the history of fair housing policy in Minnesota with this neighborhood at the center. Similarly, Struggle for the City’s chapter on Milwaukee discusses at length the impact of local activists’ leadership seminars on the city’s famed housing marches. But Handley only briefly touches on the school desegregation protests by Lloyd Barbee and the Milwaukee United School Integration Committee (MUSIC). MUSIC’s campaign, which included the organization of freedom schools across Milwaukee’s North Side, is arguably a clearer, if less well-known, example of the impact of distributive agency on the city’s Black Freedom Movement compared to the housing marches. Its inclusion would have further strengthened this chapter’s argument.
These omissions do not detract from Handley’s achievements in Struggle for the City. His monograph’s insights on how neighborhoods contest harmful policies and claim a right to the city and citizenship make it a valuable resource for any scholar studying urban activism and placemaking, past and present. As minority communities find themselves under renewed threat, Struggle for the City, and the actors its documents, reminds us that the power to resist violence and fight for positive change is available to all of us, collectively, if we reach for it.