By: Lorraine Hansberry 1959

 Published in 1959, four years after Rosa Parks’ was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a bus, sparking the Civil Rights Movement, Hansberry’s play illustrates black America’s struggle to gain equal access to opportunity and expression of cultural identity.

 (May 19, 1930– January 12, 1965) Note: She died young of pancreatic cancer at just 34 yrs old.  She grew up in Southside Chicago as the youngest of four children.  Her parents were activists.  She moved to New York to pursue writing career.  Wrote the first drama written by an African American woman and produced on Broadway, age 29.  Raisin in the Sun is by far her best known work.

 In 1937, businessman Carl Hansberry, Lorraine's father, defied the local property association by purchasing a home in a white neighborhood.  After losing in state court, the case was brought to the US Supreme Court.  In a crucial decision in segregation, the US Supreme Court, on November 13, 1940, ruled in Hansberry v. Lee that whites cannot bar African Americans from white neighborhoods.  The decision focused on the legal technicalities, instead of the segregation issue.  Though victors in the Supreme Court, Hansberry's family was subjected to what Hansberry would later describe as a "hellishly hostile white neighborhood."

 Debuted in 1959, prior to the Civil Rights Movement  Received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play of the Year (Hansberry was the youngest, 5 th woman and only black playwright at the time to win the reward.)  According to James Baldwin (African American writer/philosopher), the play received such acclaim from the African American community because "'never before in American theater history has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on stage'"

 The play is essentially about dreams, taking it’s title from the Langston Hughes poem “ Harlem”  Each member of the household has a separate dream.  As the play develops, tensions rise as each family member comes in to conflict with each other as the limited resources of the family cannot support all of the family members dreams.

 Southside Chicago -1950’s  Housing was a constant issue, as the growing African American population was crammed in to a small part of the city known as the “black belt” of the Southside.  Landlords took advantage by chopping up apartment buildings and cramming more people in to each building.  Crime rates increased, quarrels over shared kitchens and bathrooms caused tremendous strain.  African-Americans had traditionally been “last to be hired, first to be fired” after World War II resulting in unstable incomes and more poverty.

 The working title of A Raisin in the Sun was originally 'The Crystal Stair' after a line in a poem by Langston Hughes. The new title was from another Langston Hughes poem, which asked:Langston Hughes "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, Or does it explode?"

 Hansberry’s reference to Hughes’s poem in her play’s title highlights the importance of dreams in A Raisin in the Sun and the struggle that her characters face to realize their individual dreams, a struggle tied to the more fundamental black dream of equality in America.

 A Raisin in the Sun can be considered a turning point in American art because it addresses so many issues important during the 1950s in the United States.  The stereotype of 1950s America as a land of happy housewives and blacks content with their inferior status resulted in an upswell of social resentment that would finally find public voice in the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s.

 Protagonist : Walter Younger  Antagonist : Karl Lindner and the Clyborne Park Improvement Association  Conflicts : person vs. person, person vs. society, person vs. self  Setting : Chicago’s Southside, a rundown apartment, between  Theme : The triumph of courage over character flaws and social injustice

 Walter Lee Younger - The protagonist of the play. He wants to be rich; wants to invest his father’s insurance money in a new liquor store venture.  Beneatha Younger (“Bennie”) - Beneatha is twenty years old, she attends college, and is better educated than the rest of the Younger family. She dreams of being a doctor and struggles to determine her identity as a well- educated black woman.

 Lena Younger (“Mama”) - religious, moral, and maternal. She wants to use her husband’s insurance money as a down payment on a house with a backyard to fulfill her dream for her family to move up in the world.  Ruth Younger - Walter’s wife and Travis’s mother. Ruth takes care of the Youngers’ small apartment. She is about thirty, but her weariness makes her seem older..

 Travis Younger - Walter and Ruth’s sheltered young son. Travis earns some money by carrying grocery bags and likes to play outside with other neighborhood children, but he has no bedroom and sleeps on the living-room sofa.  Joseph Asagai - A Nigerian student in love with Beneatha. Asagai, as he is often called, is very proud of his African heritage, and Beneatha hopes to learn about her African heritage from him.

 George Murchison - A wealthy, African-American man who dates Beneatha. The Youngers approve of George, but Beneatha dislikes his willingness to submit to white culture and forget his African heritage.  Mr. Karl Lindner - The only white character in the play. He offers the Youngers a deal to reconsider moving into his (all-white) neighborhood.  Mrs. Johnson - The Youngers’ neighbor; warns them about moving into a predominately white neighborhood.

 A Raisin in the Sun is essentially about dreams, as the main characters struggle to deal with the oppressive circumstances that rule their lives.  Every member of the Younger family has a separate, individual dream—Beneatha wants to become a doctor, for example, and Walter wants to have money so that he can afford things for his family.  The Youngers struggle to attain these dreams throughout the play, and much of their happiness and depression is directly related to their attainment of, or failure to attain, these dreams.  By the end of the play, they learn that the dream of a house is the most important dream because it unites the family.

 The Youngers struggle socially and economically throughout the play but unite in the end to realize their dream of buying a house.  Mama strongly believes in the importance of family, and she tries to teach this value to her family as she struggles to keep them together and functioning.  Walter and Beneatha learn this lesson about family at the end of the play.

 The Younger apartment is the only setting throughout the play, emphasizing the centrality of the home.  The home is a galvanizing force for the family, one that Mama sees as crucial to the family’s unity.  The play ends, fittingly, when Mama, lagging behind, finally leaves the apartment.

 Manly pride  Cultural pride  Family pride

 “Eat Your Eggs”  Being quiet and eating one’s eggs represents an acceptance of the adversity that Walter and the rest of the Youngers’ face in life. Walter believes that Ruth, who is making his eggs, keeps him from achieving his dream, and he argues that she should be more supportive of him. The eggs she makes every day symbolize her mechanical approach to supporting him. She provides him with nourishment, but always in the same, predictable way.

 The most overt symbol in the play, Mama’s plant represents both Mama’s care and her dream for her family.  The plant also symbolizes her dream to own a house and, more specifically, to have a garden and a yard

 When the play begins, Beneatha has straightened hair. Midway through the play, after Asagai visits her and questions her hairstyle, she cuts her Caucasian-seeming hair. Her new, radical afro represents her embracing of her heritage.  This prefigures the 1960s cultural credo that “black is beautiful.”