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ABSTRACT
Between 1965 and 1973, a coalition of local Washington, D.C., activists, organized as the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), prevented construction of two freeways that would have destroyed neighborhoods and reshaped local communities. This essay reads their rhetorical practices as an example of decolonial delinking. To do so, I first re-tell the story of Washington, D.C., as an ongoing project of coloniality characterized by three dominant colonial habits: fostering division between local residents, articulating technocratic reasoning, and denying a local sense of place. Then I show activists overcoming those colonial logics by (1) building a multi-racial, cross-class coalition that modeled self-governance; (2) reclaiming the city as an organic being; and (3) engaging in rhetorical placemaking to imagine D.C. as home. This example of the ECTC orients our attention to de/coloniality as layered, ongoing processes, as well as the way that coloniality has facilitated our democratic imaginary symbolized by the nation's capital.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank archivists at the D.C. Public Library and the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, who went to extra lengths to make materials available during pandemic conditions; Holly Brewer, Jessica Enoch, Ashwini Tambe, and Laura Rosenthal, who read a previous version of this manuscript; the participants in a spirited Sunday morning panel discussion at the 2022 Rhetoric Society of America conference, who engaged in thoughtful conversation; and the two QJS reviewers and editor, who facilitated an unusually generative review process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Zachary M. Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.: The Three Sisters Bridge in Three Administrations,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004): 648–73; Raymond A. Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 30, no. 5 (2004): 674–706.
2 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 4–24.
3 Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
4 Michael Lechuga, “An Anticolonial Future: Reassembling the Way We Do Rhetoric,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 4 (2020): 384.
5 Danielle Endres and Samantha Senda-Cook, “Location Matters: The Rhetoric of Place in Protest,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 3 (2011): 264; Candice Rai, Democracy's Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2016); Sara L. McKinnon et al., eds., Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); Michael K. Middleton et al., Participatory Critical Rhetoric: Theoretical and Methodological Foundations for Studying Rhetoric in Situ (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).
6 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords and the Struggle for Liberation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 25.
7 Barbara A. Biesecker, “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as Scene of Invention,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 124–31; Cheryl Glenn and Jessica Enoch, “Drama in the Archives: Rereading Methods, Rewriting History,” College Composition and Communication 61, no. 2 (2009): 321–42; Davis W. Houck, “On or about June 1988,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 132–7; Barbara L’Eplattenier, “An Argument for Archival Research Methods: Thinking beyond Methodology,” College English 72, no. 1 (2009): 67–79; K.J. Rawson, “The Rhetorical Power of Archival Description: Classifying Images of Gender Transgression,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2018): 327–51; Janine Solberg, “Googling the Archive: Digital Tools and the Practice of History,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 15, no. 1 (2012): 53–76; Mary E. Stuckey, “Presidential Secrecy: Keeping Archives Open,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9, no. 1 (2006): 138–44.
8 Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies 5 (2018): 19; Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
9 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2/3 (2007): 243.
10 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Speaking of Indigeneity: Navigating Genealogies against Erasure and #RhetoricSoWhite,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 497; Kate Siegfried, “Making Settler Colonialism Concrete: Agentive Materialism and Habitational Violence in Palestine,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17, no. 3 (2020): 272.
11 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (New York: Cassell, 1999), 2.
12 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation, 26.
13 “The History of the Anacostia River,” Washington Post, May 2, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/the-history-of-the-anacostia-river/2012/05/01/gIQA1VuAxT_story.html.
14 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 6.
15 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 9–11.
16 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 15.
17 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 6.
18 Mark David Richards, “The Debates over the Retrocession of the District of Columbia, 1801–2004,” Washington History 16, no. 1 (2004): 54–82.
19 Quoted in Richards, “The Debates over the Retrocession,” 58.
20 Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice & Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Philadelphia: UPenn Press, 1995), 14.
21 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 17.
22 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
23 Carlos G. Alemán et al., “Editorial: Communication, Race, and Outdoor Spaces,” Frontiers in Communication 7 (2022): 02, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2022.966343; Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 244.
24 Catalina M. de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking from Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 5 (2018): 537.
25 Gillette, Between Justice & Beauty, 28; Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 81, 97.
26 Gillette, Between Justice & Beauty, 49.
27 Michael K. Fauntroy, Home Rule or House Rule? Congress and the Erosion of Local Governance in the District of Columbia (Dallas, TX: University Press of America, 2003), 4.
28 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 146.
29 Fauntroy, Home Rule or House Rule?, 30.
30 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 147.
31 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 127.
32 Fauntroy, Home Rule or House Rule?, 31; Gillette, Between Justice & Beauty, 61.
33 Catalina M. de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking from Energy Coloniality in Puerto Rico,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 46, no. 5 (2018): 536; Fauntroy, Home Rule or House Rule?, 32; Gillette, Between Justice & Beauty, 66.
34 Bell Julian Clement, “Primed for Development: Washington, DC's Great Society Transitions, 1964–1974,” in Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C., ed. Derek Hyra and Sabiyha Prince (New York: Routledge, 2015), 45–65.
35 Gillette, Between Justice & Beauty, 82.
36 Gillette, Between Justice & Beauty, 46, 88–108.
37 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), 127, 188; Johanna Bockman, “Home Rule from Below: The Cooperative Movement in Washington, D.C.,” in Hyra and Prince, Capital Dilemma, 66–85; see also Raymond A. Mohl, “The Interstates and the Cities: The U.S. Department of Transportation and the Freeway Revolt, 1966–1973,” The Journal of Policy History 20, no. 2 (2008): 196.
38 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 258.
39 Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.,” 650.
40 Fauntroy, Home Rule or House Rule?, 5, 28, 34–5; Clement, “Primed for Development.”
41 Romeo García and Damián Baca, Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions (Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2019), 20.
42 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords, 25.
43 Walter D. Mignolo, “Delinking,” Cultural Studies 21, no. 2/3 (2007): 449–514, 453.
44 Wanzer-Serrano, The New York Young Lords, 22–3; de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking,” 549; see also Adriana Angel and Luis Miguel López-Londoño, “Delinking Rhetorics of Neoliberalism: An Analysis of South American Leftist Presidents’ Speeches,” Journal of International & Intercultural Communication 12, no. 1 (2019): 43–62; Frida Buhre and Collin Bjork, “Braiding Time: Sami Temporalities for Indigenous Justice,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2021): 227–36; García and Baca, Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise; Erik Johnson, “In the Midnight Hour: Anticolonial Rhetoric and Postcolonial Statecraft in Ghana,” Review of Communication 22, no. 1 (2022): 60–75; Casey Ryan Kelly, “Détournement, Decolonization, and the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz Island (1969–1971),” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 2 (2014): 168–90; Kenneth Walker, Climate Politics on the Border: Environmental Justice Rhetorics (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2022).
45 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place,’” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25.
46 Mohan Jyoti Dutta and Jagadish Thaker, “‘Communication Sovereignty’ as Resistance: Strategies Adopted by Women Farmers amid the Agrarian Crisis in India,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 47, no. 1 (2019): 34.
47 Nathan R. Johnson and Meredith A. Johnson, “Time and the Making of Space in Urban Development,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2021): 215–26.
48 Walker, Climate Politics on the Border, 11; Johnson and Johnson, “Time and the Making of Space”; Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive.
49 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”; see also Taylor N. Johnson and Danielle Endres, “Decolonizing Settler Public Address: The Role of Settler Scholars,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 24, no. 1/2 (2021): 333–48.
50 Susan Oakley and Louise Johnson, “Place-Taking and Place-Making in Waterfront Renewal, Australia,” Urban Studies 50, no. 2 (2013): 353.
51 Johnson and Johnson, “Time and the Making of Space.”
52 Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 4.
53 Mohl, “Stop the Road,” 675.
54 Bob Levey and Jane Freundel Levey, “End of the Roads,” Washington Post, November 26, 2000.
55 “Massive Rally Set at Bridge Site Today,” Washington Post, October 19, 1969.
56 Schrag gives this legal effort most of the credit for stopping the freeways. He notes that “street demonstrations captured much of the press's attention and bore some fruit,” but he calls “the most effective citizen protest” the “quiet, deliberative efforts within the established system of political power,” which included these lawsuits as well as Peter Craig and likeminded allies’ work from within the newly created Department of Transportation. Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.,” 649.
57 Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.,” 649.
58 Phineas Fiske, “Happiness Is No Freeway,” Washington Post, July 27, 1969.
59 “Smash the 3-Sisters Bridge!,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1969, The People’s Archive, D.C. Public Library.
60 “Smash the 3-Sisters Bridge!”
61 “Smash the 3-Sisters Bridge!”
62 “Washington: Freeway Blackmail,” Environmental Action, October 17, 1970, 4–5.
63 “Welcome to Your Last Colony,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers [n.d.], The People’s Archive, D.C. Public Library.
64 “Three Sisters Bridge Revisited,” WTOP Editorial, April 3–4, 1972, ECTC Collection 36, Box 36, Folder Clippings November 1972, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library (emphasis in original).
65 “Ft. Lincoln Project (New Town),” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1965–68, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
66 Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 119.
67 Karma Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 8–9.
68 “Abbott Leads Freeway Foes,” Washington Post, August 19, 1969, C1.
69 Levey and Levey, “End of the Roads.”
70 Schrag, “The Freeway Fight in Washington, D.C.,” 650.
71 Eisen, “Abbott Leads.”
72 Mohl, “Stop the Road,” 676.
73 Jack Eisen, “Freeways Are Called Highways for Whites,” Washington Post, September 15, 1966.
74 “Dear Fellow Citizen,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1965–68, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
75 “Urgent Meeting!,” p. 2, ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1971, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library (emphasis in original).
76 “The Fight Goes On,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1970, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
77 Jack Eisen and Irna Moore, “Fists Fly at Voting on Roads,” Washington Post, August 10, 1979.
78 “The Fight Goes On!” (emphasis in original).
79 “Resolution,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 40, Folder Legal and Press Materials 1965–66, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
80 “On Aug 9,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers [n.d.], The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
81 “Public Letter to Mayor Walter Washington,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1971, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
82 “A Brake to the Bulldozer,” The New York Times, February 21, 1968.
83 “Open Letter to Gilbert Hahn, Jr.,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1969, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
84 “D.C. Voters Oppose Bridge in Poll,” Washington Post, November 5, 1969.
85 “Wide Support for Citizen Referendum Grows,” Press Release, November 2, 1969, ECTC Collection 36, Box 40, Folder Legal and Press Materials 1969–72, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
86 “3 Sisters Bridge Opposed by 85%,” Washington Post, November 6, 1969.
87 “D.C. Voters Oppose Bridge in Poll,” Washington Post, November 5, 1969.
88 Mignolo, “Delinking,” 464–6, 495, 485; see also Maldonado-Torres, “On the Coloniality of Being,” 244.
89 Mignolo, “Delinking,” 485, 495.
90 Greg Dickinson and Brian L. Ott, “Neoliberal Capitalism, Globalization, and Lines of Flight: Vectors and Velocities at the 16th Street Mall,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 13, no. 6 (2013): 529–35.
91 “A Statement to the Bishops of the Washington Area,” February 26, 1968, ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1965–68, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
92 Angela Rooney, “Freeways,” October 1971, p. 8, ECTC Collection 36, Box 34, Folder Rooney, Angela, “Freeways: Urban Invaders,” The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
93 Rooney, “Freeways,” 6.
94 “An Open Letter to John A. Volpe,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Flyers 1971, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
95 “Freeways in the Nation's Capital: A Threat to Open Space, the Urban Environment, and the Democratic System,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 40, Folder Legal and Press Materials, 1969–72, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
96 Carlos G. Alemán et al., “Editorial: Communication, Race, and Outdoor Spaces,” Frontiers in Communication 7 (2022): 02, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2022.966343 (accessed May 9, 2023).
97 “Build Freeways or We'll Starve You!,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Flyers 1970, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
98 “An Open Letter to Maryland Governor Tawes,” November 19, 1965, ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Flyers 1965-1968, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
99 “A Declaration of Independence from the Highway Trust Fund,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 36, Clippings 1968-71, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
100 Rooney, “Freeways,” 6.
101 “A Statement to the Bishops of the Washington Area,” “Human Renewal or the Final Solution?,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1965–68, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
102 “Highway Lobby Consolidates Power,” February 12, 1970, ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Flyers 1970, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
103 Maria Lenore Worris, “Statement from Brookland Neighbors to: Board of District of Columbia Commissioners,” January 17, 1967, ECTC Collection 36, Box 40, Folder Legal and Press Materials 1967–68, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
104 “Unless People Stop Freeway Plans … ,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers [n.d.], The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
105 “A Statement to the Bishops of the Washington Area.”
106 “‘Prayer’ and Some Prophecies,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1970, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
107 “Human Renewal or the Final Solution,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Flyers 1965–1968, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
108 Oakley and Johnson, “Place-Taking and Place-Making.”
109 Endres and Senda-Cook, “Location Matters,” 261; see also Joshua P. Ewalt, “Cultivating Consubstantiality with the Land Institute: Organizational Rhetoric and the Role of Place-Making in Generating Organizational Identification,” Communication Monographs 85, no. 3 (2018): 392.
110 Nayrouz Abu Hatoum, “For a ‘No-State Yet to Come’: Palestinian Urban Place-Making in Kufr Aqab, Jerusalem,” EPE: Nature and Space 4, no. 1 (2021): 98.
111 Siegfried, “Making Settler Colonialism Concrete,” 269.
112 Derek G. Handley, “‘The Line Drawn’: Freedom Corner and Rhetorics of Place in Pittsburgh, 1960s–2000s,” Rhetoric Review 38, no. 2 (2019): 173–89; Rothstein, The Color of Law, 64; Mohl, “Interstates and the Cities,” 196.
113 Rothstein, The Color of Law, 127.
114 Rothstein, The Color of Law, 127.
115 Mohl, “Interstates and the Cities,” 196.
116 Tom Lewis, Washington: A History of Our National City (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 396–7.
117 “Take the Plywood off These Homes!,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers [n.d.], The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
118 “Second Rally to Re-Open the Homes!,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers 1970, The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
119 “An Appeal to the Brookland Community,” ECTC Collection 36, Box 41, Folder Flyers [n.d.], The People's Archive, D.C. Public Library.
120 Phillip D. Carter, “House Is ‘Reopened’ in Freeway Protest,” Washington Post, June 22, 1969.
121 For a similar example, see Yvonne Slosarski, “Jamming Market Rhetoric in Wisconsin's 2011 Labor Protests,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (2016): 250–68.
122 “Second Rally to Re-Open the Homes!”
123 Handley, “‘The Line Drawn,’” 175.
124 “When the Big Leagues Destroyed the Barrio,” Smithsonian National Museum of American History, https://americanhistory.si.edu/pleibol/game-changers/big-leagues-destroyed-barrio.
125 King, Navarro, and Smith, Otherwise Worlds.
126 Kelly, “Détournement, Decolonization, and the American Indian,” 168–90.
127 See Lethobo King et al. for an invaluable treatment of the relationships between Indigeneity, anti-Blackness, and the efforts to repair for both.
128 Mignolo, “Delinking,” 459; de Onís, “Fueling and Delinking,” 538; Walker, Climate Politics on the Border, 4; King, Navarro, and Smith, Otherwise Worlds.