Redlining In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

The play, A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is written based off of her experiences with her family and her struggles with discrimination. The play takes place in the Southside of Chicago between WW II (1939) and the 1950’s. The play is about an African American family, the Youngers, and their efforts in a world of discrimination. The play’s plot is most influenced by the actions, conflicts and dialogue of Mama and her son Walter as they differ on opinions and decisions.

Hansberry wrote a private play to bring the audience into a close relationship with the family, including flaws and all. It improves the audience’s impression of black people. Hansberry kept their drama to themselves to let the audience know that Blacks had an exclusive world that they only share. Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun to tell the story on how it was to be Black in the 50’s and how they dealt with the discrimination, segregation, and

“A Raisin in the Sun,” written by Lorraine Hansberry in 1959, was the first play ever produced on Broadway by an African-American woman and was considered ground-breaking for it’s time. Titled after Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem,” sometimes known as “A Dream Deferred,” the play and the subsequent film adaptations are honest examinations of race, family, poverty, discrimination, oppression and even abortion in urban Chicago after WWII. The original play was met with critical praise, including a review by Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times where he wrote, “For A Raisin in the Sun is a play about human beings who want, on the one hand, to preserve their family pride and, on the other hand, to break out of the poverty that seems to be their fate. Not having any axe to grind, Miss Hansberry has a wide range of topics to write about-some of them hilarious, some of them painful in the extreme.” The original screen adaptation released in 1961 was highly acclaimed in its own right, and was chosen in 2005 for preservation in the United States of America National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for its cultural and historical significance. While both stage and screen portrayals were highly acclaimed there are some similarities as well as some marked differences in each interpretation.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is a story about two workers named George Milton and Lennie Small who are working in a ranch outside of Soledad, California. George takes care Lennie ,who is mentally disabled, throughout their adventure. Throughout the book, there is profound language, racism, and sexism found. These factors make people question if it is appropriate for high school students to read and analyze this book. Even though it includes these factors, Of Mice and Men should not be banned.

In the novel A Raisin In The Sun, Lorraine Hansberry brings in multiple characters for brief periods. Each character impacts the story in his or her own specific way. In Hansberry’s realistic fiction novel, she allows the reader to experience what it is like to live in a time period where African Americans and Whites are not considered equals. She gives in depth scenarios, showing what it is truly like to be an African American in Chicago during the 1950’s. The characters in the story experience a multitude of issues involving society, culture, and family.

Through the use of the historical lens, looking specifically at the economic struggles, the struggle of unequal opportunity, and the housing covenant that African-American’s faced in the 1950’s, Hansberry’s message of A Raisin in the Sun is revealed: the perseverance of an ethnic minority in a time of racial discrimination. A Raisin in the Sun is set in a time of great racial discrimination, the 1950’s in the united States. This featured racism towards those of color or non-caucasians, and the struggles commonly faced by the African-American family is shown through the eyes of the Younger family through the writing and experiences of Lorraine Hansberry.

When the government and private banks failed, racial violence began when mobs destroyed black family homes and beat them up on streets. Eventually, black people fled their neighborhood, and made Chicago become the “Second Ghetto”. In the article, Coates talks about the story of Clyde Ross, a black man who fled worsening conditions in Mississippi to find jobs in Chicago. As many Americans dreamed of owning a home, Ross worked hard in order to earn money and support his family. However, the only way for black people to own a house in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century was to buy a house from predatory contract sellers, who charged huge rates with few legal protections for buyers. As a result, Ross had to find one more job to pay for the house. Not only Ross, but also Mattie Lewis, Ross’s neighbor, who also faced a similar situation of housing inequality. From the story of Ross and Lewis, Coates claims that the homebuyers of black people are getting ripped off, but they have to accept it, and the only way for black people to get a home is to get robbed by white

A black doctor is forced out of his new home when the majority-white neighborhood sets his garage on fire. Soon after, a line of explosives are planted to drive out black families nearby. “98 percent of the public-housing units in Chicago” are built in majority-black neighborhoods. Time after time after time, black people are denied loans and mortgages, while their white counterparts are granted them happily by the lenders. And yet, one often encounters crude statements about the “ghetto”, the alleged home of all black families. When thinking of the ghetto, people generally conjure an image of a gritty, crime-infested, and hopeless place. Who decided this? Certainly not black people. Interestingly enough, just the presence of black families within a majority-white neighborhood in the 1900s caused those homes to drop in value, by thousands. If you were a white home owner who had spent five years’ wages on your first home, wouldn’t you want to protect your investment by all costs?

In the book, "A Raisin in the Sun"- which takes place in the 1950's, it talks about how A character in the book, Mama- buys a house for her family in A "white neighborhood". This is a problem because, in this time period, black neighborhoods & white neighborhoods were segregated.

A few of these factors include: discrimination, institutional racism, private residential choices, street crime, urban renewal and economic inequality (Shelby 39). The fact about today’s segregation patterns is that black segregation directly corresponds with concentrated disadvantage. In fact, several intellectuals who’ve studied influences, such as American philosopher and author Tommie Shelby, that have contributed to the prevalence of black ghettos refer to the residents as the “ghetto poor”. These two terms have become so synonymous that it made logical sense to tie them together when describing the individuals living in these deprived neighborhoods. Furthermore, it is no secret that black people have continuously been put at an economic disadvantage. With this comes the phenomenon of class prejudice in which affluent, white families seek to “carve out enclaves” that exclude poor, minority groups, majority of which are black. Even more corrupt is that fact that the wealthy upper class whites have the legal power to do this because of the “institutional nexus of home-ownership rights, tax policy, local political autonomy, and the authority to restrict school district membership” (Shelby

The setting of the Raisin in the Sun is the ghetto of Chicago, where most black families lived and most of these black families had dreams of moving to a better neighbourhood, because of crime, but the housing industry causes segregated housing and manipulates communities with white fears of black integration. When Lorraine Hansberry was a child, her family also experienced the results of a government unconcerned with blacks leaving segregation. Lorraine used her play to tell people about her own struggle with racism, her play shows us that her problems were handled with determination.

In June of that year Hansberry earned a title of the “most promising playwright” of the season. A Raisin in the Sun would later become the longest- running black play in Broadway’s history. The reason behind the plays success and popularity was because it explored a “universal theme—the search for freedom and a better life.” (AAYA) The play’s original run on Broadway lasted for nineteen months and a total of 530 performances. Hansberry sold the movie rights of A Raisin in the Sun to Columbia Pictures, a few years later she wrote two more screenplays which involved some provocative new scenes that highlighted the problems African-Americans faced during that period of time but was declined by Columbia Pictures.

Being able to dream is one of the major rights a person can have. And also being able to pursue that dream is also another step forward. Having the same opportunities as other people is seen as one of the most important rights a person can have in this world. Each of the characters in the Younger family has a particular individual dream. One wants to move to a bigger home, one wants to attend medical school, one wants to rise above his social class though does not necessarily have a plan to do so. Each person’s dream serves an important psychological function hope, motivation, direction for the character; however, the dreams also divide the characters, creating conflict among them. Since the 1950s much change has occurred and it has been satisfactory change. The change has been tremendous and it has been enough. The rights that have been

I feel that people should be nicer to Walter since he is not a bad boy though when people are making him angry he starts acting like a bad boy. In Walter 's class, people were making fun of his speech problem. This led Walter to act like a bad boy. I feel that Walter should not get angry and instead try and make the teacher notice more when his classmates have been making fun of him. “I read quickly, and there was a chorus of laughter in response” 42. If the teacher stopped his classmates from making fun of Walter then there would be no problem and Walter would not be angry.

Almost everyone has wanted to believe something so badly that they convince themselves it is true. The fantasy people create makes them happy for awhile but eventually it falls apart and gives way to reality, and this reality is often a great disappointment. The Younger family in Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning play, A Raisin in the Sun, experience such a fall from fantasy to reality as does the narrator in James Joyce’s short story, “Araby.” Finally, a whole town has a similar experience in Edward Arlington Robinson’s poem “Richard Cory.” While the intended themes and authors’ purposes of these three famous literary works may not be the same, one overarching theme does connect them: