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The Camp For Underprivileged Children

Curtis Price

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When I was young, a group of us from my nearly all-Black neighborhood were enrolled in a summer camp for city children to expose us to the soothing wonders of the great outdoors. The camp was ...

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Get Out While You Can!โ€

Curtis Price

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โ€œCan I get a ride to the State Store?โ€ โ€œSure,โ€ I said โ€œHop in.โ€ Leon lives upstairs, mid-40s, Black, with an oversized head on a small frame, talkative and personable. Heโ€™s a Huntsville native and knows ...

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Defining Hard Crackers: From the Editors

Curtis Price

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1. Modern American society is a ticking time-bomb where an impending social explosion is hinted at by everyday violence of all kindsโ€” the abuse of children; physical and sexual attacks by men against women, against other ...

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The Infrapolitics of Voting in the South

Curtis Price

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Whatever the arguments against voting and participation in electoral politics โ€“ and they are sound arguments; the great sucking sound of the Democratic Party absorbing and digesting social movements is real – in certain circumstances struggles ...

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“Shit-Life Syndrome” (Oxycontin Blues)

Curtis Price

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The drug crisis is hard to ignore in the South – and not just in the rural areas. People keel over waiting for buses or lie slouched and zoned out in cars, as if some zombie-inducing ...

โ€œIโ€™m A Modern Man Who Knows How to Wailโ€: A Hip-Hop Poet in Fin de Siecle Paris

Curtis Price

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โ€œIโ€™m the Outcast . . . the โ€˜distinguishedโ€™ chap/Who puts it all in poetry/Iโ€™m more than half crushed to bits / Between the Bourgeoisie and the Worker/Iโ€™m the bloke whose work one hates/Iโ€™m a closet of ...

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“Stand Up and Be Counted”: Aretha, Sixties Soul, and Power

Curtis Price

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I was never a fan of Motown and sixties R&B; it came a decade before I came of age and I was never retroactively especially drawn to it. But that musical era still brings back memories ...

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This Mongrel Nation

Curtis Price

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โ€œAmerican culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestable mulatto . . .Indeed, for all ...

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Beyond A Boundary

Curtis Price

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On a job in an upscale Baltimore assisted-living facility that I worked at for far too long, going to work meant dealing with a running quasi-racial tension where lines were sharply drawn and people adhered to ...

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Black Panthers

The Ex-Panther

Curtis Price

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When I lived in Baltimore and went to events sponsored by the anarchist bookstore, often Iโ€™d notice the presence of one or two ex-Panthers, stray corks bobbing in an ocean of youthful whiteness. They stayed to ...