a raisin in the sun by lorraine hansberry

Hansberry left a powerful legacy as a civil rights advocate and served as the inspiration for Nina Simone’s 1969 song “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.This play tells the story of a lower-class black family's struggle to gain middle-class acceptance. Although she published many other writings, A Raisin in the Sun was her only major play, and she died of pancreatic cancer five years after it premiered. Hansberry, who was the first black playwright and only the fifth woman to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, was also the youngest dramatist to achieve the honor. Kwame Kwei-Armah’s 2013 play Beneatha’s Place imagines Beneatha’s journey as she travels with Asagai to Nigeria and, instead of becoming a medical doctor, becomes an academic at a prominent university in California. In 2010, Bruce Norris, a white playwright, wrote Clybourne Park, which features the white family who sells the house to the Youngers. The work received the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play and has seen numerous international revivals and film adaptations.Īlthough the play does not depict what occurs after the Youngers leave their run-down Southside apartment, two playwrights have since taken up the story to imagine what happens next. A Raisin in the Sun addresses the fortitude and trauma of fighting for one’s dreams as an African American in mid-20th-century America. At the end of the play, the Youngers prepare optimistically to hold their heads high as they move into a white neighborhood that has already expressed its displeasure with the idea of the family moving to Clybourne Park. The case occurred nearly thirty years before the Fair Housing Act, which forbade housing discrimination, was passed as part of the Civil Rights Act in 1968. In her memoir, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, Hansberry remembers living in a “hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’” and facing angry white mobs that “spat at, cursed, and pummeled” them as they walked to and from school.

The play, which has become highly canonized, reflects a 1940 lawsuit in which young Hansberry’s family fought against housing discrimination that prevented them from moving into a white neighborhood.

A raisin in the sun by lorraine hansberry