American life Essay

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun reflects the cultural context in which it was created, reflecting crucial changes in American life. In particular, it reflects the American mainstream’s new tolerance for civil rights and African Americans’ rising aspirations, but it also inspired a great deal of criticism from black leftist intellectuals for paying too little attention to black issues and focusing too much on integration. The play tells the story of the Younger family, who still live in their dilapidated Chicago apartment long after they migrated north and dream of improving their lives. Mama, the old-school matriarch, fulfills her late husband’s dream of buying a home, using his insurance money for a house in all-white Clyborne Park. (Her aspirations and actions seem modest, but they are rather bold for the time and imply the older generation’s wisdom. ) Her grown son Walter dreams of making a fortune but loses the family’s savings, though he redeems himself by deciding the family should move despite white neighbors’ disapproval. Ruth, his wife, is bitter but believes in Walter’s dreams and stands by him despite his faults. Beneatha, Walter’s flighty younger sister, is the most comical character; a college student aiming to become a doctor, she seeks her identity through two different suitors – rich, effete George Murchison (Hansberry’s symbol for affluent blacks’ pretensions) and Nigerian Joseph Asagai (who inspires Beneatha to reconnect with her heritage). It draws partly from Hansberry’s own experience regarding integration. Born into an affluent black family in 1930, Hansberry moved at age eight with her parents to Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, then a white, middle-class enclave; he parents had to wage a long legal battle to move there, resulting in a Supreme Court decision that allowed racial covenants in housing. Like her family, the Youngers in A Raisin in the Sun face white neighbors who claim good intentions but try to discourage blacks from moving into the neighborhood. The family sees through Karl Lindner’s false friendliness, and Beneatha comments, â€Å"He said everybody ought learn to sit down and hate each other with good Christian fellowship† (Hansberry 107). The play appeared during a crucial phase of the civil rights movement, only five years after the Brown decision outlawed segregated facilities and only two years after the tense integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. Though the movement’s best-known campaigns focused on the South, author Mark Newman illustrates that the NAACP waged a long, successful campaign focused mainly on ending unwritten segregation and promoting integration in the North, especially Chicago (Newman 44). Indeed, Chicago was the site of extensive race riots in public housing in 1953 (Hanley et al 316), and in the 1960s Martin Luther King tried but failed to get Chicago’s neighborhoods to end their de facto segregation and stop driving out prospective black residents. Hansberry demonstrates that integration in the North was still a challenge, especially when the antagonists were not violent but superficially genial, like the Lindner character, who proposes a buyout and tells the Youngers, â€Å"I want you to believe me when I tell you that race prejudice simply doesn’t enter into it† (Hansberry 104), when it certainly does. When their meeting ends, Lindner’s words – â€Å"I hope you know what you’re getting into† (Hansberry 138) – betray his true feelings and perhaps those of Northern whites in general, who often favored integration but had patronizing attitudes and did not want black neighbors. In this, Hansberry launches a subtle but nonetheless clear attack on white hypocrisy. She also comments on the different facets of black society, which have different aims at this crucial time in their history. Mama has the most modest aspirations but also the most common sense; her simple, realistic desire for a home is both conservative and radical, since it involves integration, then the civil rights movement’s chief aim, though Mama is by no means militant. Walter, though fiery and impractical, sees her point of view after his own dream fails and takes a stand, refusing to defer Mama’s dream and telling Lindner they will move to Clyborne Park regardless â€Å"because my father – my father – he earned it† (Hansberry 138). The dream is Mama’s, but she and Walter together refuse to defer it any longer and act boldly. Meanwhile, Beneatha – the most comic character for her flightiness – represents younger, ambitious blacks’ efforts to find themselves. Studying to be a doctor, she rejects her mother’s traditional beliefs and dates two men who represent black youths’ aims. On one hand, George Murchison represents the black bourgeoisie, of whom Beneatha says, â€Å"[The] only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people† (Hansberry 34). Instead, she seeks her identity through Joseph Asagai, a Nigerian fellow student whose comment, â€Å"Assimilationism is so popular in your country† (Hansberry 48), makes her look away from integration as an answer. Walter, always humoring his sister, tells her, â€Å"You know, when the New Negroes have their convention . . . [you are] going to be the chairman of the Committee on Unending Agitation† (Hansberry 98). Though white audience hailed the play, black intellectuals did not receive it with equal regard. Writing in 1963, social critic Harold Cruse (a leftist who opposed integration in favor of Malcolm X-style separatism) excoriated Hansberry for catering to white liberals’ sensibilities, claiming she wanted to â€Å"assuage the commercial theater’s liberal guilt† and calling A Raisin in the Sun â€Å"a good old-fashioned, home-spun saga of some good working-class folk in pursuit of the American dream . . . in [whites’] fashion† (Cruse 278). In addition, he claimed Hansberry had an â€Å"essentially quasi-white orientation through which she visualizes the Negro world† (Cruse 283) and believed her not militant enough. Indeed, scholar Richard King claims that the play was part of a greater social context in which â€Å"cultural, racial, and religious differences were downplayed or denied in postwar America† (King 4). He claims that Hansberry downplayed her own characters’ blackness to the same degree that The Diary of Anne Frank downplayed its characters’ Jewish identity, and that Hansberry and others like her were â€Å"advocating the integrationist vision and falling prey . . . to ‘misapplied internationalism’† (King 273). However, Hansberry explores the black community’s different attitudes, rendering these criticisms ill applied. Though she was by no means militant and hailed from an affluent background, she experienced integration first-hand and knew it was not an easy sell-out (as the militant Cruse claimed). Instead, according to black scholar Jacqueline Bobo, Hansberry aimed to fight American popular culture’s still-prevalent negative black stereotypes and claimed in 1961, â€Å"I did not feel it was my right or duty to help present the American public with yet another latter-day minstrel show† (Bobo et al 184); instead, she wanted to present characters with dignity, intelligence, and genuine aspirations, which in 1959 was still a bold effort. The play is not militant, but neither does it whitewash its characters. A Raisin in the Sun is more than simply a play about a black family moving out of the ghetto; it reflects the social and cultural context of its time. It embraces the civil rights movement’s integrationist aims and reminds the audience that the Youngers’ move will not be easy, and it comments on black society’s conflicting outlooks while avoiding stereotypes. While it did not take a militant extreme by countering white racism with a racism of its own, it reflects a greater American context in which ending segregation was still a struggle, but one which the American mainstream supported and aspired to achieve (to varying degrees). REFERENCES Bobo, Jacqueline, Cynthia Hudley, and Claudine Michel, eds. The Black Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: William Morrow, 1967. Hanley, Sharon, Stephen Middleton, and Charlotte M. Stokes, eds. , The African American Experience. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Globe, 1992. Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Random House, 1959. King, Richard H. Race, Culture, and the Intellectuals, 1940-1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Newman, Mark. The Civil Rights Movement. Westport CT: Praeger, 2004.