a Raisin in the Sun

a Raisin in the Sun

For the Hansberry, challenging the system in place was part of their way of life. “Negro” was printed on Lorraine Vivian Hansberry’s birth certificate, but Carl and Nannie Perry Hansberry crossed out the label and stressed the right to decide their child’s racial identity as they pleased. It has been written that important figures of the civil right movement such as W.E.B Dubois made frequent visits to the house.
During the time when African-Americans were portrayed in plays as contend with their status, Lorraine chose to write a dramatic play that challenged this myth of “negro” satisfaction.   The insurgence paid off when A Raisin in the Sun won popular and critical acclaim such as the Drama Critics Circle Award for 1958-1959. Even Puff Daddy (the rapper) had produced this year a another version of the play for television.
In A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry brilliantly exposed the stress of poverty. It is a story of poor black family’s struggle to gain middle-class acceptance. When Lorraine was eight years old, the family moved into a predominantly white neighborhood. At the time, the father was in the midst of a Supreme Court case involving housing discrimination. Because he won the case, a mob threw bricks into the Hansberry’s house. That experience gives readers a sense of her fight and her source of inspiration.
On stage, five humans are squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment and the death a man gives the family a hope for the future. Unfortunately, The American dream means something different to each character in the play before their different ages and genders.
Mama, the sixty-year-old mother of the family, is waiting for a $10,000 insurance check from the death of her husband. Mama wants to relocate in a white neighborhood. Her dream is to own a house with a garden and yard in which Travis, her grand son, can play.
The son, Walter Lee Younger, want to invest in a liquor store that he believe will quadruple the money. He is so desperate...