Urban renewal In Pittsburgh, Handley noticed another strategy: The use of place. Think back to the “You will not build” billboard erected at Freedom Corner. “It meant to unify the community around this one central part in the city. In the case of Pittsburgh, they proved to be successful. (Officials) didn’t do any building past that point,” Handley said. The legacy continues today. Freedom Corner is still a meeting place for organizations like Black Lives Matter and the Occupy movement. A personal history, and a lasting history One reason this area of study drew Handley was because his family lived it. His parents left behind homes in Alabama and North Carolina to settle in Pittsburgh as part of the Great Migration, and Handley’s older siblings grew up in the Hill District. In 1968, when the country passed the Fair Housing Act, Handley’s parents moved the family to the Pittsburgh suburbs. “Which meant for me, my life was completely different. By the ‘80s, if I’d still been in the Hill District, where the crack epidemic ravaged these communities, who knows what my life would have been like?” Handley wondered. “I’m not disparaging anyone who grew up in urban environments, but it shows one particular effect that that law had. Members of my family were affected by urban renewal.” And urban renewal is still going on today, he notes, but this time, it’s gentrification. Younger, usually white and more affluent, professionals are moving to cities and buying up housing in areas that have traditionally been minority communities. That in turn increases housing costs, often pricing out long-time residents. And now, just like then, people are beginning to resist. Handley recounts the story of a neighborhood record store in Washington, D.C., that had played music outdoors each day for more than 20 years. People new to the predominately-black area complained about the noise. “Their rhetorical strategy of resistance was, not only are we going to play this music; we’re going to play it louder, and we’re going to turn this block into a block party,” Handley said. “And they rallied around this location as the resistance point of gentrification. They said, you will not quiet us. If you want to live here with us, you’re going to accept our cultural norms instead of trying to impose yours. “You will not build past.” By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science 8 • IN FOCUS • February, 2020
UWM Team Awarded M A collaborative team led by Ann Hanlon, head of Digital Collections and Initiatives at the UWM Libraries, and Dan Siercks, interim director for Web and Data Services in the UWM’s College of Letters & Science, has received a $50,000 Andrew W. Mellon Grant through Ann Hanlon the University of Nevada Las Vegas, for the “LGBTQ+ Audio Archive Mining Project.” The core team also includes Marcy Bidney, assistant director for Distinctive Collections at UWM Libraries, and Cary Costello, associate professor of sociology and director of UWM’s LGBT Studies program.
Dan Siercks
The UWM Libraries house one of the largest collections of historical and contemporary LGBTQ+ materials in Wisconsin and the Midwest, including a rich record of Milwaukee’s LGBTQ+ communities. The “LGBTQ+ Audio Archive Mining Project” will use machine learning tools and data analysis and visualization to build and process text datasets extracted from a variety of AV materials in these collections, including collections of oral histories, local television news and radio broadcasts, and early LGBTQ+ community cable programming. The project will aid in a deeper understanding of the contents of these collections, and enhance discoverability of previously unrecognized topics, relationships, and patterns that shed light on the history of the LGBTQ+ community in Milwaukee and the Midwest. “This project is especially exciting,” Hanlon says,
