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Summary Of Down These Mean Streets By Piri Thomas

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In Down These Mean Streets, Piri Thomas informs the reader about the challenges his family had to overcome in Harlem, New York. Four siblings, a mother, and father all cramped up in an apartment with no proper heating, with drug addicts as neighbors, and an unsafe environment out in the streets which required constant police patrol. Thomas narrated a time during the early 1940s when he ran away from home at the age of 12. He observed a policeman ignore his situation for the sole reason as Thomas mentioned, “After all, a twelve-year-old kid walking the streets at 3 a.m. was a nothing sight in Harlem” (Thomas 6). In other words, the living environment in Harlem had to be so dangerous that seeing a kid in the streets at night was a gift for police
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