On April 16, 1985, a group of protestors blocked a bus from moving to draw attention to the fact that buses serving Cleveland, Ohio were inaccessible to people in wheelchairs. From there, the stories diverge. The underlined story is from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the newspaper of record for the city. In it, Mosley and Quinn (1985) tell a story of a tiny, yet organized, group who stopped a bus, were met by reasonable police officers who tried to restore traffic flow, and left after arranging a meeting to discuss their concerns. The italicized story is from Mary Verdi-Fletcher (2008), one of the protestors, but as retold to choreographer David Rousseve. Rousseve, a choreographer from UCLA, was commissioned in 2005 to choreograph a dance performance based on the protest as a joint performance piece between the Dancing Wheels Company & School and the Cleveland Contemporary Dance Theatre. He wove together Mary's story, interviews with dancers about their experiences with disability, and his own experience as an African American growing up in America to show how each component sheds light on the others. These interilluminations were recognized by critics; Salisbury's (2005a) review of the dance piece — Walking on Clouds (WoC) — found that the performance was "a skillful blend of text, movement and music" that "focuses on issues of identity that are shared by people with disabilities and people of color" (p. E4).In this collective retelling, the story of Mary Verdi-Fletcher and her companions' actions become those of a large body of inspired civil rights advocates who stared down a modern-day Bull Connor and forced the city to immediately promise to make all buses in Cleveland accessible.

Mosley and Quinn's story, published the day after the protest, is likely more accurate to the events of that day. WoC, first performed in 2005, is less accurate: April is unlikely to be a "scorching summer day," ten people cannot "surround" a bus, the RTA commissioner was not in Cleveland that day, and Cleveland City Council did not agree to buy a single accessible bus until November. Indeed, the Dancing Wheels website acknowledges that "the work blends fact, fiction and possibility to find the connections, both emotional and historical, between people with disabilities and African Americans." The point of WoC is not to be historically accurate; it is meant to be truthful to the experience of the protestors that day as they sought to redraw the bus map of Cleveland. As Verdi-Fletcher told the first author in a 2008 personal interview, she saw the bus protest as an opportunity to change "stereotypic images of disability." Moreover, the transformation of a historical event into a dance repertory piece was not an attempt to document that day, but to raise awareness of unequal treatment of individuals living with disabilities, to rewrite those events into the larger narrative of civil rights, and to advocate for rewriting city spaces.

In this essay, we do not seek to "correct" WoC. As rhetorical scholars, we believe that history is both a material and a rhetorical construction. We agree with Michel de Certeau (1988) that "The Writing of History is the study of writing as historical practice" (p. xxvi). Writing does not merely record history by putting events into words, the words themselves manufacture history (de Certeau, 1984). Rather than appealing to an objective record, de Certeau questioned the truth of a history premised on monolithic discourse. He called on writers to be clear about how they select discourse and to be critical of their own rhetorical constructions of history. Although we privilege a story with known errors in this essay, de Certeau encourages us to do so. Indeed, he writes, "whereas historiography recounts in the past tense the strategies of instituted powers, these 'fabulous' stories offer their audiences a repertory of tactics for future use" (1984, p. 23).

As rhetorical critics, we are interested in how these "fabulous stories" participate in activists' efforts toward social change. Although the use of aesthetics in the telling of WoC have been well-examined (Quinlan & Harter, 2010; Quinlan, 2010) in this essay, we choose instead to bring forth our own fabulous story. Specifically, we interweave multiple discourses of the bus performance in 1985 and its staging by Dancing Wheels. We begin with Verdi-Fletcher's account because, in WoC, her private identity is staged and, as such, there is little sense in separating Verdi-Fletcher's private life and her public performances. We read Verdi-Fletcher's story, both as told through choreographer David Rousseve for WoC (2008) and as told to us in an interview, alongside the dominant historical account represented in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Although Verdi-Fletcher's version could be read to supplant the Plain Dealer's ableist account, we view them as supplementary to one another in telling the story of that day. In addition to these textual fragments, we draw on the script of WoC and interviews with Margaret Meyer (an activist with disability who was at the protest) and former Cleveland transportation commissioner, J. Barry Barker. In this manuscript, we weave together these pieces of spoken discourse and bodily enactments because (1) we see the verbal accounts as telling stories about how bodies were used to perform advocacy and because (2) we see the performances of advocacy (both at the protest and the stage reenactments) as ways of telling these verbal accounts differently to advocate to alternative audiences. That is, the verbal accounts offer the weft and the bodily performances the warp that can be knit together into a new storied, advocatical, and artistic whole.

As weavers of discourse, we are actively writing our own history of the bus protest even as we rely on the materials made available to us. We are, in de Certeau's terms, poachers. de Certeau (1984) informs us, in poaching from a text,

Reading introduces an "art" which is anything but passive.… Imbricated within the strategies of modernity (which identify creation with the invention of a personal language, whether cultural or scientific), the procedures of contemporary consumption appear to constitute a subtle art of "renters" who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text. (p. xii)

In one's private use of a text, rather than obedience to the dominant interpretation of history, de Certeau encouraged readers and authors to (1) explore the way dominant performances shape what we understand to be possible, (2) to recombine the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products, and (3) to create new modes of practice. As such, this essay attempts to enact poaching both from history (the historical landscape and the textual fragments that litter that landscape) and from de Certeau's theoretical writings. Three concepts helped us write the fabulous story of the bus protest, which were: walking in the city1 ; the strategic terrain as practiced by the dominant; and, the tactical interventions deployed on the ground. We first examined the varied accounts and reenactments of that day, tracking the convergences and divergences of the texts. Following this process, we then interpreted how how and why these occurred in the context of de Certeau's ideas. Because de Certeau offers insight into how strategies, tactics, and walking in the city rearticulate power and will from limiting to empowering factors for advocates, we find that this protest challenged not only the lack of accessibility to buses, but also assumptions of a lack of power by the disabled community. After (re)writing the story of April 19, 1985 with the aid of these three concepts, we end with some conclusions and implications that this analysis has for disability rights advocacy and social movements.

Navigating Space: Walking in the City

The first concept that helped us write the story of the 1985 bus protest and its reenactment in WoC is walking in the city. For de Certeau, there would not be a city if it were not for the people who define and create the space by moving through it. de Certeau (1999) called this the "rhetoric of walking" (p. 131) and used the metaphor of walking in the city to explain the act of reading the text. Although he chose the term walking, other ordinary but transformative ways of using space could be substituted as spatial practices. de Certeau (1984) defined walking as "a space of enunciation" because it exemplified an individual's ability to "constantly alter" a landscape simply by moving through it (p. 98). Consequently, he linked physical mobility with walking's symbolic function in negotiation of a place.

de Certeau described "the city" as a "concept" generated to control our ability to walk. The city consists first of the maps drawn by governments and other institutional bodies who seek to describe the city as a unified whole or draw it as it might be seen from high above. He described the "voluptuous pleasures" of experiencing the city from above as a condition that views, but does not navigate, the city:

To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city's grasp. … elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was "possessed" into a text that lies before one's eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. (de Certeau, 1984, p. 92)

de Certeau (1984) used the skyscraper metaphor to demonstrate urbanists' misunderstanding of lived practices. In contrast to the god's eye view of the map, the walker at the street level moves in ways that are unanticipated by the plans of organizing bodies. The walker takes shortcuts or meanders aimlessly in spite of the utilitarian layout of the grid of the streets. Walking becomes a performance of resistance that rewrites what a city space can mean.

In de Certeau's view, walking, as bodily movement, is a form of rhetorical movement. As Morris (2004) put it, "Space and place are not merely inert or neutral forces of the built environment; instead they must be activated by the 'rhetorical' practices of users and passers-by" (p. 677). This activation can be both resistant to and supportive of preexisting social orders. Walking in the city can be conservative in that spaces can be divided for those who do not belong (Hubbard & Sanders, 2003; Tanner, 2002). In addition, Bates (2002) has shown that some forms of walking in the city serve to mask inequality by reinforcing nationalistic and capitalist norms. Some walking, however, is resistance. For example, Lindemann (2007, 2008) discussed how wheelchair rugby players and homeless street vendors reappropriate city spaces in ways that are both inconsistent with the desires of urban planners and that seek to alter dominant definitions of sport and commerce.

If we took the city as concept and employed the god's eye view, a map of the bus routes would indicate there is not an accessibility issue in Cleveland. Following the 1985 bus protest, the transportation commissioner, J. Barry Barker, declared that all buses in Cleveland would be made accessible. He told us the RTA asked itself, "What were we going to do in order to end the protest? We did move the conversation from the streets over to the sidewalk. We asked what they wanted and they laid out that they wanted lifts on all the buses." Even with these changes, though, if we regard the city as text, anyone walking or wheeling through the streets of Cleveland would experience it as less accessible. As Verdi-Fletcher mentioned, although all of the buses were made accessible, this was still an abstract plan in 1985. But even after Barker's promise was fulfilled, wheeling onto the bus was still a limited practice, even with lifts. Verdi-Fletcher said:

And some of the problems that existed were that they [the drivers] didn't use them that much at first. But then when they needed to use them, either the driver couldn't remember how the equipment worked or the equipment failed so the person with the disability that waited out there for the service didn't get service. So then they stopped waiting.

Verdi-Fletcher tells us that people with disabilities wanted to stop waiting for change because they recognized that slow pace of the partial implementation of accessible transport. They recognized wheelers' lesser freedom to engage the city as a form of discrimination and wanted it changed sooner, not in an indefinite and undefined future. The bus system attempts to control the riders' needs and ability to move because, once you get on the bus, you can only go where the bus is going. One can only go on the roads and routes authorized by the city planner.

Attempting to get off the bus still limits wheeling in the city more than it does walking. Many of the streets of Cleveland are inaccessible to people with disabilities. Not all of the curbs are cut, crosswalk signals lack "beeps" or "chirps" to say when it is safe to cross, and many buildings lack ramps. The overall lived terrain of Cleveland is one of ableism, regardless of how flat and open the god's-eye view would make it appear. The physical landscape reflects the ideological landscape. One modification — accessible buses — does not change the whole of the lived experience, nor does it ameliorate the overall rhetoric of ableism. This protest was explicitly modeled on other rights movements and, similar to civil rights and women's rights, disability rights were not to be appeased by isolated, minor actions. The story of April 16 frames a larger engagement with the dominant order as needed to free-wheeling in the city.

The Strategic Terrain Practiced by the Dominant

Because the bus protest was resistance enacted on this physical and rhetorical terrain, it then becomes sensible to examine how it utilized civil rights discourse to make its case for change. We turn, therefore, to the use of strategies in social movements. de Certeau (1984) defined a strategy as "the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an 'environment'" (p. xix). That is, when an individual or institution can define who is allowed into a space, and then begins to deploy power to control access, that individual or institution is able to control both a physical space and the way in which people can live in that space through strategic control. This strategic control can be physical (like an occupying army), or it can be rhetorical (as in the case of linguistic and social structures that include and exclude). Later, de Certeau (1984) argued that strategy

postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. As in management, every "strategic" rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its "own" place. (p. 35)

Although a strategy may be employed to promote social change, strategic interventions also participate in and obey the terrain authorized by the dominant order. That is, by claiming a "rightful place" for individuals living with disability, social advocates for disability rights also reify the order of rights and place articulated by that system.

Because "strategies" generally are connected with power, strategies for social change also tend to invoke and actualize a stratified ordering of social reality accepted by dominant institutions. The actions employed on April 16 appealed to the dominant order. Verdi-Fletcher claimed that the problem was that

door-to-door services weren't working. And how there was this three year waiting list or six-year waiting list for people to be able to use that door-to-door system. And if you did get on that system, chances are you couldn't use it for work. You could only use it to go to the doctors. Yeah, and so it was so antiquated that it was amazing, because it was stifling. It didn't prove to support the independence of people with disabilities.

Verdi-Fletcher was critical of the shuttle that would take individuals to doctor's appointments, but not to other everyday places such as work. Although this advocacy of a right to ride a bus challenges the status quo at first glance, Verdi-Fletcher primarily adopted a consumer mentality advocating convenience. Moreover, her reasons for riding the bus reflect three other assumptions of the dominant strategic order: (1) one should participate in the economic order through work; (2) the technologically new should be preferred to the old; and (3) individualism should be unquestioned. These statements reflect not only a challenge to the status quo, but also an acceptance of a dominant order of liberalism. Likewise, Barker's acceptance of this challenge was not because it represented social change, but because it supported capitalist values. He claimed, "We did a feasibility study and the next order of buses had lifts… We found in the transit industry — it made it easier for everyone, could speed up service. The other side is it costs you less money." Although rights may have been the god-term employed, efficiency and savings also made the change acceptable to Cleveland City Council.

When Verdi-Fletcher realized there was a problem with Cleveland's busing, she first tried to use the accepted strategies of the political system. Verdi-Fletcher did not want to be considered a "bad" protester, so she went to be "properly" trained by ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) to carry out a successful bus protest that would get her point across, while maintaining her "good girl" identity. In the 1980s, ADAPT's primary goal was to make public transit systems accessible (Fleischer & Zames, 2001; Shapiro, 1993). Verdi-Fletcher told us that in 1985 she was "a very kind of proper person. I always learned to be very respectful from my parents and I'm the kind of person that goes by the book, pretty much… I was this good little girl." Margaret Meyer, another activist with disabilities who participated in the protest also said, "I consider myself a good girl, a puritanical person, a law abiding person." To perform this proper behavior, Verdi-Fletcher said,

Prior to working with people with disabilities, they [ADAPT] had trained women in women's rights and the African American community in civil disobedience and such. But it was planned civil disobedience. It wasn't just going out there and rioting. It wasn't just that. It was more like when we went, we went to Washington and they trained us.

Following the advice of ADAPT, the protestors appealed to the dominant order by going to the transportation commission, giving testimony, and asking them to make the buses accessible numerous times before she went and protested. She reported to us,

We wrote all kinds of testimony to the public transit system. I have flashbacks of going before them and it was on the front page of the Plain Dealer, the newspaper, that three activist women would go and give testimony and talk about why it was important for people with disabilities to get on public transportation and why the door-to-door services weren't working.

These modes of participation support normal channels of political communication. Letters beseeching powerful central decision makers' aid or testimony that requests them to act fit well with an overall political structure that supports those who already have political power. When the dominant order does not listen though, individuals need to find different techniques (Scott & Brockriede, 1969). Since the testimony did not bring about the desired social change, Verdi-Fletcher and her fellow protestors invented other techniques to gain attention. Yet, for Verdi-Fletcher, a "bad strategy" is one that does not follow the rules. As such, it was necessary to show two things: that they had exhausted normal channels of social change and that their alternative channels would still be acceptable to the dominant order. Verdi-Fletcher showed this two-step process when she revealed:

We were told [by ADAPT], "you go and you make one more public statement to the transit system." So you go there publicly, you plead with them to create a plan with you on making busses accessible…. if they say no, they decline you or they put you off, be prepared to go out on the streets and what you need to do is go on a one way street and when the bus pulls up, you go in front of the bus — when the bus pulls up at the light. When the light turns red, you go in front of that bus and don't move, and then you encircle the bus. So you get your nondisabled counterparts and ask them to go on the bus and respectfully ask that the bus driver turn off the bus and allow the people to leave if they have to go wherever — to work or whatever; they can get off the bus but the bus isn't moving."

Meyer agreed with account. In a more direct summary of the switch from normal, accepted channels of social change to alternative channels with ADAPT's structure, she said,

It all began by us going to an RTA meeting. If the RTA did not address our concerns, we would go to the streets. They refused to address our concerns. We learned from ADAPT. We followed some of their basic guidelines.

ADAPT emphasized, and the protestors learned, that their bus protest could interfere with the vehicle's operation, but could not interfere too much. People riding the bus were to be allowed to go about their day, and the bus driver was to be treated with respect.

To reintegrate the disruptions caused by the bus protest into the dominant order, Verdi-Fletcher also tapped into civil rights narratives that have become widely accepted. Verdi-Fletcher drew parallels between her life and the life of Rosa Parks. She said,

It's amazing because it happened to Rosa Parks in 1955 and it happened to us in 1985, but I was born in 1955 so there's this incredible thing that most people wouldn't even know. I mean, you can't touch on everything in the piece but I know it.

Rosa Parks is widely celebrated. Although her civil disobedience violated the law in 1955, emulating Rosa Parks would in 1985 (or 2011) be seen as acceptable. By refusing to get out from in front of the bus, just as Parks refused to get out of her seat, Verdi-Fletcher appealed to our acceptance of the Parks story as a reason to accept ADAPT's actions as well. Indeed, Verdi-Fletcher worked to compare ADAPT to the civil rights movement throughout the interview. Later, she described the protests as follows:

You don't know that history is being made at the time you're doing it. You just know that you're on a mission to do something and mission accomplished. I'm sure that the leaders of yesterday — the big leaders — just were on that mission to do something. They didn't know they were gonna be written up in history books or that Martin Luther King was — a month was gonna be dedicated to him and that he will go down in history and no one will ever forget what he did. Now I'm not sure that the magnitude of what we did would be on that level but it still made history. But when you're making history you don't think about that.

In this description, Verdi-Fletcher compares herself to the most memorable figure of the civil right movement: Martin Luther King, Jr. Verdi-Fletcher admits that the bus protest was not as big as the March on Washington. Yet, her comment that we will not know whether history is made until much later encourages the reader to assume that the disability rights movement will ultimately have the same kind of impact as the civil rights movement. This move fits well as a strategic representation of disability rights; by aligning herself with Parks and King, Verdi-Fletcher becomes a civil rights leader. And, if Americans accept the justice of the civil rights movement, this strategic move implies that they must also accept the disability rights movement and make accommodations for individuals living with disabilities.

Scholars interested in social movements have acknowledged that one mode of social change is to participate in the system by taking advantage of strategies offered by that system (Simons, 1976; 1991; Touraine, 1981; 1985). Verdi-Fletcher creatively participated in the system and used strategies available to her in the 1985 bus protest. In discussing this protest, the newspapers, WoC, and the one-on-one interview with Verdi-Fletcher all privilege the story of Verdi-Fletcher; the multivocality of others who participated in the protest becomes silent. Although Meyer told us "there wasn't one person who was the leader of that day. It was a group of people, a handful of people that were in the protest," in the David Rousseve performance (2008), "We" (protestors present) becomes "I," standing for only Verdi-Fletcher's story.

Social protest scholars have acknowledged the advantages of having a single unifying leader in mobilizing individuals and changing laws (Gring-Pemble, 2001). The disability movement has been compared to other social movements in which there was a single unifying leader (Shapiro, 1993). When Verdi-Fletcher emerges as a single unifying leader, the disability movement appears to obey strategic terrain in which, for a movement to have legitimacy, it needs to have a single leader.

Collectively, this unity of rights-based talk and the emphasis on liberalism and individualism reflect the strategic terrain on which Mary Verdi-Fletcher and the bus protestors operated. As individuals with disabilities, however, most of the protestors would not be able to hold this ground for long. This is why it is necessary to also examine the tactics employed in the bus protest.

Tactical Interventions Deployed on the Ground

So far, the story of April 16, 1985, appears to be entirely planned, as if it were the protestors who controlled the city, rather than the City Council. However, as Verdi-Fletcher told the first author, the protestors did not know whether they would need to "capture a bus." She said, "I think we did a 10:00 a.m. hearing" before the protest, "so by noon I know for sure we were out doing this, capturing at noon because it was the highest traffic, it was people at lunch time." Verdi-Fletcher and her colleagues had appealed to City Council one last time, but realized that a high profile incident could attract additional attention and prompt change. This incident occurred less than two hours after the organization had made its final request. Meyer described the speed in which this intervention was deployed. She told us,

We left the RTA meeting and headed to the lobby. We made a list of radio and TV stations. We went to the public phones and called the stations and said, "there is going to be a demonstration in Cleveland today like never before in Public Square in about an hour." We tried to get up the nerve. We waited for an opportunity.

Because the media were notified only two hours in advance, the protest likely seemed spontaneous to the radio and TV stations. Although the protestors had had a significant amount of training in the principles of busing protests, the intervention was deployed at a tactically appropriate moment. Verdi-Fletcher told us:

The media always needs something to really spark, and it just seemed to be the right statement but it wasn't calculated. It wasn't planned. It just came right out of my mouth and it was right from my heart. And generally when I'm able to do that, it's a significant moment.

Indeed, the seeming spontaneity of the moment seems to influence Verdi-Verdi's recollection such that the antecedent — the "it" in her statement — seems to blend the protest (which was planned in advance) with the media moment (which was an action taken in time). The advance scouting, combined with the kairotic seizing of time and space at the most opportune moment, allow us to access the tactical engagement of the protestors with the bus system on April 16. Verdi-Fletcher's emphasis on the moment and the spark, and Meyer's discussion of opportunity, indicate that the story cannot be one of strategies for social change only, but also of tactics taken in places and moments.

In opposition to strategic terrain, de Certeau (1984) defined a tactic as "a calculus which cannot count on a 'proper' (a spatial or institutional localization)" (p. xix). Whereas strategy operates by laying down rules, a "tactic insinuates itself into the other's place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance" (de Certeau, 1984, p. xix). de Certeau saw ordinary people developing "tactics" (an "art of the weak").

These tactics do not require control over space, nor do they demand obedience to cultural norms of meaning-making. Rather, de Certeau saw ordinary people as "poachers," pinching the meanings they need from the cultural commodities offered to them. He viewed everyday practices as tactical interventions; walking, shopping, and talking could be performances that momentarily and locally challenge, and perhaps undermine, power structures built in the strategic terrain. Embodied knowledge of the street allows street grids to be negotiated in new ways. People take short-cuts between gridlines, jaywalk across them, and stall and park on desired lines of movement. By walking the street, the street grid becomes a lived experience that could, potentially, open up a moment of difference. de Certeau (1984) theorized that when people utilize tactics, they are able to challenge the dominant culture through

victories of the "weak" over the "strong" (whether the strength be that of powerful people or the violence of things or of an imposed order, etc.), clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, "hunter's cunning," maneuvers, polymorphic situations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike. (p. xix)

According to de Certeau, the weak are those who live in the city rather than plan it; they find ways to make space for themselves and to express self-determination (see Sheldrake, 2007). Hubbard and Sanders (2003) used de Certeau's understandings of tactics to discuss the ways strategies are designed to regulate and segregate prostitution in Birmingham, Alabama, away from dominant ways of viewing the city.

In the story of April 16, 1985, Verdi-Fletcher and the bus protestors engaged in numerous forms of small local resistances. Verdi-Fletcher employed tactics, in addition to strategies, because her body was encoded as weak by the dominant representational order. She would be considered doubly weak because she is a woman and an individual with a disability. As she said of her encounter with the lead policeman, "I'm 65 pounds so he could pick me up and just throw me right wherever you wanted to." As a person with a disability, the writing of the city streets pushed Verdi-Fletcher into the status of the weak because she was not involved in the planning of the city and the city did not take into consideration the ways in which individuals who use wheelchairs move through the city.

Verdi-Fletcher explained the ways in which she makes use of tactics when she talked about her role in the disability rights movement. She discussed the ways in which she feels compelled to teach people about disabilities. She said,

Well, I always feel that it's my duty to educate people about disability. I think the views of disability haven't changed that much over the years. I think that a person, a novice person, I will say, that hasn't had a direct encounter with a person with a disability generally still has the same stereotypic attitude, which is fear.

The staged performance of WoC, which has a segment about the 1985 bus protest, is just one of the tactics that Dancing Wheels and Verdi-Fletcher use to challenge dominant understandings of disability. In part of the performance, the dancers from Dancing Wheels chant, "I want you to see me, I want you to see me." For Verdi-Fletcher, this means, "I do not want you to judge me as a big wheelchair… just see me as me." Moreover, this piece is a "great opportunity to educate kids, whether it is for Martin Luther King Day or disability rights… it's certainly a fabulous piece for our repertory that is more than just dance. It has that educational component to it." On a similar note, de Certeau said:

Carried to its limits, this order would be the equivalent of the rules of meter and rhyme for the poets of earlier times: a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries, a set of rules with which improvisation plays. (de Certeau, 1984, p. xxii)

In a sense, Dancing Wheels' performance of the bus protest on stage shows the ways in which they are artistically employing tactics, such as dance movements, lyrics to songs, and voiceovers, to resist negative images of people with disabilities in society.

Tactics were employed throughout the discourse of the bus protest. The protesters had learned from ADAPT how to carry out a successful bus protest. They were instructed that, if the transportation commission did not agree to make changes, the protesters were to call the media to bring their cameras, "stand" in front of and behind a bus, encircle a second bus, and not move for at least three hours or until the police arrived. Well-timed and well-chosen tactics were employed to choose the correct moment and place to "capture" a bus.

Another tactic the protesters used was to have individuals without disabilities already inside the bus to alert the other passengers about what was happening. At the end of the protest, the protesters were successful; the transportation commissioner, J. Barry Barker agreed to make all buses in Cleveland wheelchair accessible. Nonetheless, accessible busses in Cleveland were still only a small intervention in the overall structure of ableism. The protesters in Cleveland learned from successful tactics used in transportation protests in other cities; however, once a protest has been conducted in Cleveland, protesters cannot use those same tactics in Cleveland again because the system has adapted to it. The protesters in Cleveland most likely realized that they only had one chance for tactical success. If one of the tactics did not go as planned — the media did not arrive or a policeman decided to jail Verdi Fletcher — then what? Since the Transportation Commission agreed to make buses accessible and the newspapers had reported this concession, the protestors cannot use the same tactics again because it would appear as if they were being unreasonable.

According to de Certeau, the tactics of the weak potentially undermine the strategies of the strong by misusing spaces and escaping their constraints without necessarily disturbing their boundaries. Because Verdi-Fletcher had learned nonviolent protest techniques, she knew that violence would authorize the police, as enforcers of the dominant, to intervene with apparently legitimate force.

For de Certeau (1984), the dominant order is limited in its exercise of power by the very fact that it operates strategically. The dominated order however, exercises its power anywhere it chooses because it operates tactically. To the extent that strategic power manifests itself in symbolic terms only, all power is tactical and therefore has no single source. de Certeau's concept of tactics ("stubborn procedures that elude discipline") highlights the ways individuals shape space for their own ends. The police and the protesters in Cleveland had different understandings of how the space of the streets should be used. Meyer told us that, during the protest,

one of the officers tried to encourage them to get off the street and not go to jail. We were soldiers, very dedicated to our beliefs. One talked quietly and said, "Have you ever been to jail? I don't think you would want to go to jail." "No, I am sorry. I can't get off the street." He said, "ok." Then they brought the paddy wagon.

Similarly, a police officer at the bus protest asked Verdi-Fletcher to move off the street and talk. She recalled:

I remember being really mad — it got to the point where you were mad and you were like I am not moving and they were like "Come on out." At first they were like, "Just come off the street and we'll talk about it." I was like, "No, I'm not getting off the street and talking about it. You either publicly commit now or we're not moving."

In these instances, police officers attempted to use strategic power to make the protestors move. However, the protestors used tactical power to resist moving off the street, using space for their own needs, until the Transportation Commissioner publicly committed to making the busses accessible.

It is evident that in 1985 individuals with disabilities did not live within the grid of discipline in Cleveland, as they were not allowed to ride "public" transportation. It is of no surprise that Verdi-Fletcher and her activist friends with disabilities did not wield strategic power; therefore, they employed tactics. Verdi-Fletcher did not doubt her right to enter places such as a supermarket, a hospital, or her workplace. She simply wanted to be able to do it on the same bus as individuals without disabilities. The protestors believed that being able to enter the practices of everyday life for people without disabilities was essential for individuals with disabilities to be recognized within the grid of discipline. Unlike groups who wanted specialized space (Hubbard & Sanders, 2003), the activists did not want a special bus or place; they wanted equal access. This equal access would theoretically allow them to move through the city.

Conclusions and Implications

In this analysis, we have freely poached from a theoretical field made available to us by Michel de Certeau. We have also, with the help of Verdi-Fletcher, newspaper reporters, a series of wheelchair (sit-down) and stand-up dancers, and other actors, rewritten a story of the 1985 Cleveland bus protests. The story, while fabulous, also leads us to implications that we do not wish to have framed into the realm of story alone. The first implication of this essay deals with the ability of activists to use strategic and tactical responses in their efforts for social change. The second considers performance and bodily activism as a way to rewrite cities for accessibility.

The first implication of this essay is that we cannot assume that a social actor must choose between employing strategies or employing tactics. There is a significant body of literature that examines the ability to employ either strategy as a member of the dominant group or tactics as a member of a subordinate group (e.g., Cooks, 2009; Fassett & Morella, 2008; Pauwels & Hellriegel, 2008). If we require activists to choose between strategic action, taken as using "proper" legal channels of redress, and tactical action, taken as civil disobedience, then we engage in a form of analysis that limits the symbolic possibilities available to individuals and groups who seek social change. Our examination of Verdi-Fletcher's story, however, reveals that activists can (and do) navigate between strategic actions and tactical actions for social change. Strategy and tactics are not the possession of the dominant and the subordinate, respectively; rather, they are approaches to symbolic interventions. Strategic choices — such as Verdi-Fletcher's "proper" protests, obedience of consumerist-capitalist logics, and desire to follow the civil rights movement's acceptable path toward social change — flow not from the activist's embodied position. If they did, Verdi-Fletcher would have been unable to employ strategies as a woman living with a disability. Instead, Verdi-Fletcher's ability to employ tactics reveals that access to "the stronghold of its own 'proper' place or institution" makes a strategic rhetoric a viable choice for any speaker, writer, or activist who can make sense of these seemingly formal rules for practicing a language of intervention (de Certeau, 1984, p. xx). On the other hand, tactical choices — such as blocking a bus in a particular space or calling the media to ask them to show a momentary disruption of the system — also are not tied to the embodied position of the activist. Tactics favoring disability rights are not forbidden to able-bodied individuals, as demonstrated by the fact that able-bodied individuals helped in the protest. Instead of "belonging" to the weak, tactics are manipulations "related to the ways of changing (seducing, persuading, making use of) the will of another (the audience)" by seizing on moments and opportunities in space, time and language (de Certeau, 1984, p. xx). Rather than a binary, our analysis shows that an activist can master rhetorical strategies by learning the formal rules of the system and still employ tactical interventions as moments of serious play when interventions are possible. Or, as de Certeau (1984) put it, the "two logics of action (the one tactical, the other strategic) arise from these two facets of language" (p. xx), and the person who can think through both logics will have the broadest array of choices. Instead of a strict either/or choice posed to the activist, then, we have a flexible model where strategies and tactics can operate in concordance.

In addition to the temporary concordance of strategies and tactics, our analysis found that "Walking in the City" was a helpful way for us to examine how space can be reappropriated for activist purposes. Similar to others in rhetoric and composition who have used de Certeau's concepts related to space and place, our analysis indicates that spaces and places can be rewritten (e.g., Hartnett, 1998; Stewart & Dickinson, 2008; Wright, 2005). Our addition is simple; that space can be rewritten by performing bodies, whether those bodies be on stage (as in the dance) or acting out advocacy in the streets (as in the control of the bus's movements). In the 1985 bus protest, Verdi-Fletcher and her fellow activists used the one-way street in Cleveland to conduct a protest. Obviously, individuals who designed the maps of the city did not anticipate how the street would be used. The flat plat of the city, as seen from the "god's eye" view of the city planner, makes Cleveland appear both accessible to all and impossible to alter. However, de Certeau would encourage individuals to walk through the city and recognize the ways in which the city is made walkable for certain individuals and not for others. If one goes walking in Cleveland, a significant amount of work has yet to be done to make the city accessible. Our walk in the city shows that, at least before 1985, city planners believed some people belonged in some parts of town and others did not belong. When the sidewalk lacks a curb cut, an individual in a wheelchair cannot access the sidewalk and is implicitly told he or she does not belong on that sidewalk. But, when the bus protest redrew the map of Cleveland, when a one-way street became a dead end, Verdi-Fletcher and her allies engaged in a new form of writing the system by making its lines less accessible. If the city is a map, and our movement through the city draws lines, then this protest was an attempt to rewrite at least a part of the discourse on disability and transportation.

Indeed, the actions taken by Verdi-Fletcher and her allies show that bodily movements — walking, wheeling, blocking — are performances of physio-spatial writing. Verdi-Fletcher's actions, as performed in her narrative, in WoC, and in the streets of Cleveland, were forms of writing. We agree with Flannery (1998) that performance "extends an understanding of literacy beyond the narrowly linguistic, emphasizing the extent to which the body itself served as a signifying modality, a modality that can signify in ways that extend the limits of print" (p. 44). To simply read Verdi-Fletcher's story as we have recorded it is obviously partial; to add more layers of writing, as Verdi-Fletcher does by writing, speaking, acting, and re-enacting her story, allows us to see the lines drawn, rewritten into narratives, and edited into advocacy. Each (re)telling and (re)enactment of the story is a thickening of the line that Verdi-Fletcher has drawn on the map of Cleveland, a bolder reinscription of that trace on the text of the city. By examining this line, by observing where it flows freely and where it stops because the body can no longer write on map, we can see the performative and linguistic enactment of Verdi-Fletcher's advocacy. Flannery (1998) maintains that performance encourages the possibility of resisting cultural scripts and limitations by opening a new form of writing. And, although we agree with Flannery, we believe she does not go far enough. By looking at this performance of ability, disability, and advocacy, we can also begin to see where the body's ability to walk and wheel requires a rewriting of the city map through accessible modifications. Although Verdi-Fletcher's body can show us where movement is limited by where she can no longer write on the map of the city, as academics and advocates, we believe that we must attempt to rewrite that city-scape with curb cuts, crossing signals, and other simple accommodations that would allow Verdi-Fletcher and others to expand the tablet upon which their bodies can write.