Walter Lee Younger has a dream—a dream that will get him and his family out of their tiny apartment in Southside Chicago. Money is coming in and with it will come freedom, dignity and ease.
The dream fails, but in this, the greatest play of the black American experience, a new man is born. And a new dream…
A Raisin in the Sun, which received its premiere in 1959, was the first successful Broadway play about the black experience. By portraying a black family with a greater realism and complexity than ever before, the twenty-eight-year-old Lorraine Hansberry forced both blacks and whites to re-examine the deferred dreams of black America and forever changed the American theatre.
In the 1920s and 30s the discriminatory “Jim Crow” laws in the South prompted
many African Americans to relocate to Northern cities, a movement called the
Great Migration. Nonetheless, while the North did not have laws demanding
policies of segregation be followed, discrimination persisted also in the North,
leading to segregated housing, education, and employment. In 1949 the United
States Congress passed the National Housing Act to address substandard
housing and to provide adequate and more integrated housing options for
minorities. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education
that school segregation was unconstitutional.
Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. She wrote A Raisin in the Sun, a play about a struggling black family, which opened on Broadway to great success. Hansberry was the first black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award. Throughout her life she was heavily involved in civil rights. She died at 34 of pancreatic cancer.
