Although Grimké was not as prolific and visible
as some of her contemporaries during the HAR-
LEM RENAISSANCE, she, along with MARITA BONNER,
Mary Burrill, May Miller, Eulalie Spence, ALICE
DUNBAR-NELSON, and Georgia Douglas Johnson,
made an important contribution to a wealth of
existing protest literature, which offers a unique
vision into the black experience.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth, ed. Their Place on Stage:
Black Women Playwrights in America. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Jones, Tisch. “Rachel.” In Black Theatre USA: Plays by
African Americans 1847 to Today, rev. ed., edited
by James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, 133–135. New
York: The Free Press, 1996.
Stephens, Judith L. “Anti-Lynch Plays by African-
American Women: Race, Gender, and Social
Protest in American Drama.” African American
Review 26, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 329–339.
Loretta G. Woodard
Raisin in the Sun, A
Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
A Raisin in the Sun, which opened on Broadway in
1959, was LORRAINE HANSBERRY’s first play to ap-
pear on the national stage. An immediate critical
and popular success, Raisin, which was compared
to the masterpieces of Arthur Miller and Eugene
O’Neill, won the New York Drama Critics Circle
Award in that year. The original production in-
cluded actors Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, and
the already celebrated Sidney Poitier and director
Lloyd Richards, who went on to work with another
major American playwright, AUGUST WILSON. Like
Wilson, Hansberry examined the problems of rac-
ism in America through the African-American
family and through history.
Set in Chicago, A Raisin in the Sun follows
the Younger family, whose patriarch, Walter Lee
Younger, Sr. (Big Walter), has died, leaving a life in-
surance death benefit of $10,000 as inheritance. As
the play opens, Lena Younger (Mama), his widow
and legally the sole beneficiary, considers the ways
the family as a whole could invest the money to
honor the memory of her late husband. Walter Jr.
continuously argues with Mama over whether the
money should be given solely to him, as he is now
the male head of the family, to invest in a liquor
store, a source, he is convinced, he will need to
provide financial security for the family. As a de-
vout Christian, Lena will not allow herself (or her
husband’s legacy) to be involved in such a sinful
project. Instead, Lena wants to invest in a home
in the currently all-white suburbs, where the fam-
ily can live in the comfort and safety not available
to them in the tenements of Chicago’s South Side.
Mama wants a garden and she wants Travis, her
grandson (Walter and Ruth’s son), to experience
a positive and salubrious childhood as he grows
up in a secure place. Lena also plans to invest in
the education of her daughter, Beneatha, who is
determined to attend medical school.
For the most part, the conflict of the play
centers on Lena and Walter Jr.’s different expec-
tations and sense of what is best for the family.
However, the play fundamentally is about the
family members’ various ways of achieving the
American dream. Hansberry takes the title of
her play from “Harlem,” a poem by LANGSTON
HUGHES, in which the speaker asks, “What hap-
pens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like
a raisin in the sun?... Maybe it just sags / like a
heavy load. / Or does it explode?” In this poem, the
speaker suggests that dreams that are deferred for
too long can result in devastation, even violence.
Also, the generational antagonism Hansberry
explores in Raisin suggests that as African Ameri-
cans move through the social classes, their desires
and definitions of “equality” change. Hansberry
uses the family’s dilemmas as an indictment of
American society and the often-unattainable
dreams that it proffers to its people of color and
underclass. The play foreshadowed the political
upheavals of the African-American community
in the 1960s: on the one hand, the CIVIL RIGHTS
MOVEMENT led by MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., and
its rhetoric of the “American dream” valued by
Lena; on the other hand, the BLACK NATIONALISM
and Pan-Africanism advocated by MALCOLM X, the
leaders of the BLACK POWER movement, and writ-426 Raisin in the Sun, A