Lorraine Hansbury's A Raisin in the Sun: Opening the Eyes of America to Segregation and Inequality

Ever since her rise to fame, Lorraine Hansberry has opened the eyes of many and showed that there is a problem among the American people. Through her own life experiences in the twentieth-century, she has written what she knows and brought forth the issue that there is racial segregation, and it will not be ignored. Her most popular work, A Raisin in the Sun, not only brought African Americans to the theater, but has given many of them hope (Mays 1461). Within this work, we find a “truthful depiction of the sorts of lives lived by many ordinary African Americans in the late 1950s” (Mays 1462). Though there is realism within her work, the idealism is never far away at all. Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun allows one to see that progress is made through an idealistic view of the world and that hope is the root of many changes people search for in life.

It was not uncommon for African Americans to have a realistic view on the world during the beginning of the 1900s. Segregation played a major role in shaping the century. Many just accepted things the way they were and saw no future change. During the early and mid-twentieth century, African Americans had freedom within reach, but were held back by constant discrimination. Many white Americans believed that African Americans should not have the same rights as them, even after slavery was abolished and African Americans became “free.” “Most colored Americans still are not only outside the mainstream of our society but see no hope of entering it” (Weaver 1551). The Younger seemed very realistic at times because they were one of many African American families struggling to live happily in a time when discrimination was still common. There seemed to be no hop...

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... line is not perfect and one will surely come across a few loops, but acknowledging the changes that they come across is just the beginning of making great progress in the world.

Works Cited

Hansberry, Lorraine. “A Raisin in the Sun.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed.

Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2013. 1471-1534. Print

Mays, Kelly. “The Historical Significance of a Raisin in the Sun.” The Norton Introduction to

Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2013. 1461-1462. Print.

Mays, Kelly. “The Great Migration.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays.

New York: Norton, 2013. 1462. Print.

Weaver, Robert C. “The Negro As an American: The Yearning for Human Dignity.” The Norton

Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York, 2013. 1550-1554. Print.