Clement Alexander Price

This project became available online in 1995 as "The Cemetery." The site was an attempt to provide access to my earliest artworks that addressed history, memory, and memorial within the African American community. In the late 1990's the web project evolved to include a wider range of works and the project title became "Small Towns, Black Lives." To coincide with a large survey exhibition and the publication of the book version of the project, I created the final version of the web project in 2002. "The photographs in Wendel White¹s Small Towns, Black Lives are the kinds of hybrids Lange described and anticipated in her statement. The exhibition and book form a personal album revealing the layers of meaning and history that he carefully uncovered. His project to document African American communities in southern New Jersey began in much the same way that many photographers before him had set out to record a place or people." "Neither stridently documentary nor self-consciously arty, White¹s images straddle two worlds. They adopt the cool reserve of certain recent fine art photographers ­ Lewis Baltz, for example. Yet he is also true to the sincere lens of many of photography¹s great documentarians‹such as Lange or Jacob Riis, who documented the horrid slum conditions in New York¹s Lower East Side or Lewis Hine, who took part in the influential Farm Security Administration documentary project from 1937 to 1942. White has produced a body of work that is uniquely personal and profoundly informative. His photographs thoughtfully ask us to look without preconceptions at the history he has uncovered." -- Charles Ashley Stainback, Curator.

Introduction: the history of the slave narratives -- The community and culture of the enslaved -- Hardships of an enslaved childhood -- The family under slavery -- Women and enslavement -- Work and slavery -- Physical abuse and intimidation -- Runaways and the quest for freedom

What is American culture? In Many Voices, Many Opportunities, Clement Alexander Price, Professor of American and Afro-American history at Rutgers University, provides a fresh, historical, fair-minded view of this hotly-argued question. Focusing on arts policy, one of the primary battlegrounds of the multiculturalism controversy, Many Voices, Many Opportunities convinces us that "the swirling debate about the history of American culture and its present character is quite unlike anything in American life since the early years of the civil rights movement.". Many Voices, Many Opportunities traces the ideas of cultural pluralism back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when such figures as W. E. B. DuBois asserted that American diversity, rather than creating a harmonious "melting pot," actually brought about struggles among ethnic and racial groups for equal recognition in American culture and the arts. Dr. Price argues for a pluralistic approach to culture and for a definition of national culture that is dynamic rather than rigid. He concludes that we need to change our perception of cultural and artistic worth if cultural pluralism is to succeed.

In this, the world’s first Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, readers do something more than witness the triumphs and tragedies of poets such as Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer, novelists like Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston, musicians like Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker, and performance artists such as Lena Horne and Paul Robeson. Through their challenges and victories, we are encouraged to identify and claim our own challenges and victories. Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance takes us inside the clubs, theatres, and relationships that made Harlem, New York City, the one-time “Party Capital of the World,” and one of the greatest cultural centers of any era. It also places on bold display the genius that gave the world ragtime, Jazz, the blues, gospel, swing, and all night dancing. Whereas previously the Harlem Renaissance was considered primarily as the literary achievement of a handful of writers, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance demonstrates that it was a triumphant exultation of creative genius across the cultural board and one that spread both nationally and internationally. Moreover, through leaders such as James Weldon Johnson, A. Philip Randolph, and W. E. B. Du Bois, it laid the foundation for what would grow into the extraordinary Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.