Week 7 – A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
(1959)
Mini-lecture contents
• The beginnings of the Civil Rights
movement
• Lorraine Hansberry’s politics
• American identity in the play
The beginning of Civil Rights
• National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP)
• Various legal challenges: Hansberry v.
Lee (1940); Smith v. Allwright (1944);
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
(1954-1955)
• Protests and boycotts (Little Rock, 1957;
bus boycotts, Montgomery, 1955)
‘Three weapons’
By the end of the war the blacks had
discovered the three weapons with which, in
the fifties and sixties, they were to achieve
such striking victories: the imaginative use of
political and economic pressure; the appeal
to the courts and the Constitution; violence.
(Hugh Brogan, The Penguin History of the
USA, 2nd rev edn, Penguin, 2001)
April 3, 1956, Hillsboro, Oregon. Four mothers accompanying sixteen African
American school children to the Webster Elementary School in an attempt to
demand that the youngsters be admitted.
October 3, 1957, Little Rock, Arkansas. African American students attending
Little Rock Central High are escorted to a waiting Army station wagon for their
return home after classes.
May 28, 1961, Montgomery, Alabama. Freedom Riders staging a sit-in at a
Montgomery waiting room reserved for white customers.
The beginning of Civil Rights
• Rise of Dr. Martin Luther King
March 25, 1965, Montgomery, Alabama. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with John Lewis of
SNCC, King's aide, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Dr. Ralph Bunche, Mrs. King, and Rev. Hosea
Williams arriving in Montgomery, Alabama. King led an estimated 10,000 civil rights
marchers out on the last leg of their Selma-to-Montgomery march.
The beginning of Civil Rights
‘The average Negro is born into want and deprivation. His struggle
to escape his circumstances is hindered by color discrimination.
He is deprived of normal education […] When he seeks
opportunity, he is told in effect to lift himself up by his own
bootstraps, advice which does not take into account the fact that
he is barefoot.’ (Martin Luther King)
‘I could no more imagine myself allowing the Youngers to accept
[Mr Lindner’s] obscene offer of money than I could imagine myself
allowing them to accept a cash payment for their own murder. You
see, our people don’t really have a choice. We must come out of
the ghettos of America, because the ghettos are killing us, not only
our dreams, as Mama says, but our very bodies. It is not an
abstraction to us that the average American Negro has a life
expectancy of five to ten years less than the average white.’
(Lorraine Hansberry)
Hansberry’s politics
• Edited Freedom, Paul Robeson’s
newspaper
• Moved to Harlem, 1950
• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second
Sex (Hansberry read in 1953)
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black,
adapted by Robert Nemiroff (1969)
• ‘Hansberry’s play was political
agitation. It dealt with the very same
issues of democratic rights and
equality that were being aired in the
streets. But it dealt with them not as
political abstractions, but as they are
lived.’ (Amiri Baraka)
Critical reception
• ‘[The play captures] the precise temperature of a race at
that time in its history when it cannot retreat and cannot
quite find the way to move forward. The mood is fortynine parts anger and forty-nine parts control, with a very
narrow escape hatch for the steam these abrasive
contraries build up. Three generations stand poised, and
crowded, on a detonating-cap.’ (Walter Kerr, ‘No Clear
Path and No Retreat’, in The New York Herald Tribune,
March 12, 1959, pp.1-2.)
• ‘Its middle-class thrust was […] arguably only marginally
relevant to the immediate fight for de-segregation which,
at the time, was focussed on the South.’ (Christopher
Bigsby, A Critical Introduction to American Drama, v.3,
p.383.)
Ideas to consider
• Track the character of Beneatha through the play
– what are her beliefs and desires?
– how does she develop as a character?
• Why is the idea of assimilation important in the play?
How do characters relate to their past?
• What do you consider to be the three most important
scenes in the play? Justify your choices.
• In what ways is American culture shown to oppress
African-Americans in the play?
• How is the presentation of African-Americans similar and
different to their presentation in previous plays we have
studied?