Raisin In The Sun Equality

A Raisin in the Sun: From a Young, Talented, Black girl’s heart to Broadway
From the 1860’s when African Americans gained their legal freedom, it wouldn’t be until an arduous century of resilience and civil rights seeking for the Black American community to finally attain social equality, as white racism worked against their prosperity in every way possible. One of these major setbacks was housing; Chicago’s housing market was on demand even before the end of WWII due to returning veterans. African Americans who arrived in search for jobs during 1940–1944 were limited to an area of Chicago known as the “Black Belt,” when the whites formed “restrictive covenants” that made it illegal for a house’s owner to rent or sell to black people. These

Furthermore, migration from the Black Belt to other neighborhoods only created an expansion of the slum area they so desperately attempted to escape due to the racist rejection and because a neighborhood where Blacks lived was considered “undesirable”, it often forced them into disadvantageous terms such as extremely high monthly payments which they were unable to sustain. They suffered constant verbal abuse and the threat of physical violence, their property was damaged by hurled bricks and explosives were thrown through their windows. Blacks were trapped within a vicious circle of poor, unsanitary, and at times deadly living conditions. The racial ostracism suffered by the black community from the 1930’s- 1950’s was reflected by Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun

Closely tied to her personal experiences and of those around her; it portrayed the lives of the working-class black people who rented from her father, and who went to school with her on Chicago’s South Side. She also used members of her family as an inspiration for the characters. A Raisin in the Sun, first opened by Broadway in 1959, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and ran for a total of 530 performances. (CPL). The play sparked a variety of criticisms and perspectives; The white press applauded the play for being a universal drama, which implied that the story would be the same if the black characters were replaced with white ones. Hansberry partially agreed on the universal aspect of “man’s oppression to man” but she argued that her characters were intended specifically to reflect Negroes from the South Side of Chicago. She expressed that “one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that, in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific.” Hansberry did not allow the white press nor the public to oversee the intention of the play which was to address social inequality and ostracism suffered by Black Americans on a daily basis. In a 1961 un-aired interview of Lorraine Hansberry by Mike Wallace, included in the