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Portland Observer
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Forum Theater
Weekend
‘Phenomenal
Woman’
Interactive plays to
focus on housing,
racial profiling
Survivor wins
makeover from
community
supporters
See story, page 13
See Metro, page 9
‘City of Roses’
Volume XLIV
Number 51
www.portlandobserver.com
Wednesday • December 2, 2015
Established in 1970
Committed to Cultural Diversity
Photo by o livia o livia /t he P ortland o bserver
Emanuel Price, founder and president of Second Chances Are for Everyone, a Portland nonprofit that focuses on rehabilitating former prisoners.
Success found in
turning around lives
of freed prisoners
o livia o livia
t he P ortland o bserver
Emanuel Price sits at a north Portland
café across the street from Portland Com-
munity College watching students come
and go from classes while grabbing lunch
between breaks in the rain. He notices the
students surrounding him, he says, be-
cause he himself is learning, albeit in a
different way.
Over a decade ago, Price was a 19-year-
old student back home for summer break
after attending a historically black college
in Virginia. A business management and
finances major, he struggled to pay for his
education, was anxious about not having
by
Second
Chances
are for
Everyone
his necessities covered, and worried about
the big bite of debt that higher education
would take out of him.
Not wanting to ask his struggling moth-
er for money, he took matters into his own
hands one night when a group of students
held up a convenience store at gunpoint.
“I had never held a gun before,” he
said. “I thought of it as a prop, I didn’t
know how to use it.”
His hopes and dreams as a young man
were all lost in that fateful decision. The
stolen money would not help him get
back to Virginia, and he would later be
arrested and plead out to four years in
prison. And just like that, Price went from
an honor roll student to a black felon, and
had to rethink how he was going to spend
the rest of his life.
Price served his time and today he is
C ontinued on P age 4