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 forty-nine 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?