Fair housing now! English professor reveals how rhetoric shaped resistance to urban renewal

Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Hill District in Pittsburgh was a thriving neighborhood, home to African American families who enjoyed the community’s markets and jazz clubs. The downside was that conditions were overcrowded – sometimes you found three families packed into a one-family home, for instance, as more black people moved northward to escape persecution and Jim Crow laws in the South and shady landlords took advantage.

And then the city started to tear it down.

At first, the residents were excited. Urban renewal seemed like a lively era of change where overcrowded conditions would be abated and the city would construct more and better housing. The reality was much different: Pittsburgh began cutting into the Hill District to build a new arena, and city officials had no intention of accommodating the thousands of people they displaced.

“That’s when things kind of flip,” Derek Handley said. “The residents claimed this one corner just above where the arena was built. It was renamed, over a period of time, Freedom Corner. It was a site for gatherings, to begin to do marches into downtown. They actually put a billboard on this corner saying, ‘You will not build past this point.’”

Handley is an assistant professor in his first year with the UWM Department of English. He studies rhetorical strategies that African American communities used in response to urban renewal in the ‘50s and ‘60s, with a particular focus on Pittsburgh; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Milwaukee. It’s the topic of his current book project, titled “‘The Places We Knew So Well Are No More:’ A Rhetorical History of Urban Renewal and the Black Freedom Movement.”

Derek Handley

Urban renewal meant upheaval

Urban renewal swept the nation after the end of World War II. City officials were eager to combat “white flight” and build new attractions and highways that would connect cities to their suburbs and draw people in. But overwhelmingly, the areas that they deemed “blighted” were in minority communities. And while cities razed homes, they weren’t building new dwellings for the people they displaced.

To pile on, housing policies, like covenants in Shorewood or Wauwatosa that forbade homeowners from selling their homes to African American buyers, meant black people were restricted in where they could live. In Milwaukee, for example, most black residents were funneled into the city's north side.

“You take away available housing and you’re not building enough replacement housing. So what happens? They pile on into where they could live, which creates some of the same conditions that were problematic before,” Handley said.

This shows building removal in the Lower Hill District as part of Pittsburgh’s renaissance and urban renewal programs. Photo courtesy of the University of Pittsburgh. Photographer unknown.

Faced with discrimination and loss of their homes and businesses, and inspired by the Civil Rights movement sweeping the southern United States, African Americans began to organize. In Milwaukee, residents marched to protest for fair housing, while in Pittsburgh, the sign went up in Freedom Corner.

The rhetoric of civil rights

At the heart of this resistance to urban renewal were two core concepts, Handley said. First, that African Americans had to be treated as full-class citizens – “We want equal rights. We want to live like the people in Wauwatosa, or wherever. We have the money; we can afford it. Why can’t we live here?” Handley said.

The second idea was even more basic: Humanity. African Americans argued for their humanity and that these discriminatory practices were fundamentally inhumane.

Organizers had a variety of rhetorical strategies to spread their message. While Handley certainly respects leaders of the broader Civil Rights movement like Dr. King and Stokely Carmichael, he’s fascinated by the way local leaders rallied citizens and taught them to be advocates for their neighborhoods. In Milwaukee, for example, local chapters of the NAACP and the Urban League worked with sympathetic faculty from the UW-Milwaukee extension and Marquette University to host leadership seminars to teach protestors how to speak at public hearings or how to interact with landlords.

Handley calls this rhetorical strategy “circulation of agency.”

“Part of leadership is empowering other people to become leaders in their neighborhoods and communities, and that’s what I’m seeing by studying these rhetorical strategies,” he said. For example, “One of the persons out of these classes went on to create another organization, WAICO, the Walnut Avenue Improvement Committee Organization. Through their interactions with the city and with the people, they rehabbed houses to get rid of blight.”

This shows building removal in the Lower Hill District as part of Pittsburgh’s renaissance and urban renewal programs. Photo courtesy of the University of Pittsburgh. Photographer unknown.

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