Confusion in a dream deferred: Context and culture in teaching A Raisin in the Sun

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 1998 by Kodat, Catherine Gunther

Three parties

On my party line

But that third party,

Lord, ain't mine!

There's liable

to be confusion

in a dream deferred.

-Langston Hughes, "Same in Blues," Montage of a Dream Deferred

A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway on March 11, 1959 to stellar reviews. The play was the first Broadway productiondirected by an African American (Lloyd Richards), and it featured a remarkable cast: Ruby Dee as Ruth Younger, Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger, and Louis Gossett, Jr. as George Murchison. Twenty-nine year old Lorraine Hansberry became the first African American winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and became nationally (and internationally) famous virtually overnight. And, as is so often the case in white America, Hansberry's fame made her a racial "representative"; in the years between the success of her play and her death from cancer in 1964, Hansberry repeatedly was called upon to write about and speak to the problems faced by blacks in the U.S. She met (and argued with) Attorney General Robert Kennedy; she was interviewed by Studs Terkel; in the pages of the Village Voice, she took Norman Mailer and Jean Genet to task for their representations of black people. Eventually, her fame was, as James Baldwin has written, "to cause her to be criticized very harshly, very loudly, and very often by both black and white people who were unable to believe, apparently, that a really serious intention could be contained in so glamorous a frame" (xiii).

Baldwin was a close friend of Hansberry's and a promoter of her work; "what is relevant" about A Raisin in the Sun, he wrote, "is that I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage" (xii). Baldwin's assertion here-that black people flocked to see A Raisin in the Sun because it spoke the truth of black life-is actually a response to the problem of what he euphemistically terms Hansberry's unsettling "glamor"-that is, her upbringing in one of Chicago's wealthiest and most prominent black families, an upbringing that led her critics to wonder whether in fact she could be trusted to speak the truth of black poor and working class lives.12

At the time of Hansberry's birth, her father, Carl Hansberry, was a U.S. deputy marshall in Chicago; her mother, Nannie Perry Hansberry, was a ward committee officer of the local Republican party (Cheney 1). Both parents came from "educated, cultured homes" in the South, households headed by teachers and ministers. Carl Hansberry began his business career in Chicago as an accountant in the city's first black bank; he went on to found a bank of his own before his marriage and subsequent move into real estate, where he enjoyed great financial success (Cheney 2). "A staunch Republican who totally embraced the free enterprise system," Carl Hansberry was also a friend of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson, all of whom the child Lorraine met as guests in her home (Cheney 6-7). One of the most vivid and repeatedly described events of Lorraine Hansberry's childhood-an incident that, as Anne Cheney has written, "could have provided the germ of A Raisin in the Sun" (4---came as a consequence of Carl Hansberry 's effort to move his family into a predominantly-white Chicago community. The Hansberrys were greeted with threats and taunts that culminated in a brick being thrown through the living room window; they were ordered to leave the house by the local court, which upheld the neighborhood's racially restrictive covenant. Carl Hansberry fought the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, and won; the 1940 decision Hansberry v. Lee declared restrictive housing covenants unconstitutional (Miller 141).