Hard Crackers relies on written submissions and articles from our editors and our readers. These stories can take many different forms. They can be: biographical essays recalling certain work or real life experiences; recollections or revelations regarding historic or current events; interviews with interesting characters whose voices and opinions often go unheard; reviews of books, […]
How Did I Get Here?, part 3: Iowa City Activism in the 1970s
The following is the third in a series of three excerpts from David Ranney’s longer piece “Reflections: Well, How Did I Get Here?” After leaving graduate school in 1966, I entered what I have called my first academic career. It would only last until 1974. Between 1970 and 1974, I was a faculty member at […]
How Did I Get Here?, part 2: Rudy
The following is the second in a series of three excerpts from David Ranney’s longer piece “Reflections: Well, How Did I Get Here?” Prior to going away to college, my interaction with Black people had been limited conversations with a Black cleaning woman named Louise. I loved her and would go down the basement of […]
How Did I Get Here?, part 1: On My Futile Attempt to Become a High School Athlete
What follows is an excerpt from a longer piece that explores how a red, white and blue diaper baby, raised by conservative Republican parents in a largely conservative Republican and all white suburb in a conservative religious tradition grew up to become first, a social justice activist and eventually a Marxist Humanist revolutionary. The longer […]
A Rainy Night in Georgia
In 1977, I was a signaler (radio operator) in the South African Army, the infantry. I was stationed in a camp called Mpacha, which was a few hundred yards from the border of Zambia in the Caprivi Strip of northern Namibia. When we signalmen weren’t on patrol, we had shifts in the Mpacha base underground […]
Screening Slave Revolt
There’s a line of thinking that calls out the problem of “slavery movies”—the apparent overabundance of depictions of Black people being enslaved, the way those depictions can too comfortably glide into voyeuristic pleasure at Black suffering. Why not portray other periods and experiences in Black history, this line of thinking goes. It’s an important point. […]