Lorraine Hansberry: A Raisin in the Sun

"Naturalism tends to take the world as it is and say: this is what it is, this is how it happens, it is 'true' because we see it everyday in life that way--you know, you simply photograph the garbage can. But in realism--I think the artist who is creating the realistic work imposes on it not only what is but what is possible...because that is part of reality too" (Lorraine Hansberry).

The first African American playwright to have been featured on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930 to "a successful real estate broker...and a schoolteacher." When Lorraine was eight years old, her father, Carl, purchased a home in Chicago's South Side. This purchase violated a restrictive covenant that ensured the segregation of Chicago's neighborhoods and enraged their white neighbors. The conflict resulted in the court case of Hansberry v. Lee. Her father passed when Lorraine was fifteen years old, and she would later reflect that "American racism helped kill him" (1).

By 1951, Hansberry had begun a career as writer and activist, serving on the staff of Freedom magazine, which was devoted to the cause of Pan-Africanism and published by Paul Robeson. While employed there, she made the acquaintance of W.E.B. DuBois. While working in support of the Civil Rights Movement, she covered the case of Willie McKee, as well as global affairs such as the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. However, it was her role as playwright that would fix Lorraine Hansberry's name in the canon of African American writers. The play premiered on Broadway in 1959 amid the rise of the Anti-Segregation movements and Bus Boycotts, and would anticipate the success of the Civil Rights Movement.

Gates, et al. observe that "[t]he success of A Raisin in the Sun brought Hansberry celebrity status and expanded her role as activist and spokesperson for black causes. She organized support for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and wrote the text for The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, a book prepared by the SNCC that consisted of graphic photographs of lynchings and savage beatings of civil rights demonstrators. Her work with the SNCC, as well as her criticism of the House Un-American Activities Committee, undoubtedly contributed to Hansberry's classification by the FBI as a member of 'black nationalist hate groups'" (Gates, et al. 1769-70). Hansberry would not only become a renowned spokesperson for Civil Rights, but for gay rights as well. She contributed to The Ladder, the literary arm of the Daughters of Bilitis, a Lesbian political organization; and she would negotiate the political relationship "between homophobia and antifeminism, as well as the economic and psychological factors that pressure lesbians into marriage" (Gates, 1770).

Her socio-political concerns can be observed readily in the lines of A Raisin in the Sun, which not only deals with the racism encountered in the housing restrictions of Chicago's South Side, but with gender-prescribed roles, issues of family, hopes, sociological expectations, and an increasingly urbanized, modern world. Hansberry has been quoted as having described her work as "genuine realism": one that presents lived reality as it is perceived by its subjects, but also negotiates what could happen, life's possibilities. Nonetheless, A Raisin in the Sun bears some similarities to Richard Wright's approach to representation of the individual shaped by the external world. In what ways are the Youngers shaped by their Chicago environment? How do their circumstances affect the ways in which they assess their lives?