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A Raisin in the Sun Intro

Mr. Naymik — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:37:18 +0000

Introduction

[goog doc="dc4kzt6f_22gvbsdq64"]Class Notes[/goog]

Raisin Study Questions

Raisin Study Questions

19.31 KB, pdf, 2 hits, 2010-03-11

US Literature II, Handouts

A Raisin in the Sun was first produced in 1959 and anticipates many of the issues which were to divide American culture during the decade of the 1960s. Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright, was an unknown dramatist who achieved unprecedented success when her play became a Broadway sensation. Not only were successful women playwrights rare at the time, but successful young black women playwrights were virtually unheard of. Within its context, the success of A Raisin in the Sun is particularly stunning.

In part because there were few black playwrights—as well as few black men and women who could attend Broadway productions—the play was hindered by a lack of financial support during its initial production. Producers hesitated to risk financial involvement in such an unprecedented event, for had the play been less well-written or well-acted, it could have suffered an incredible failure. Eventually, however, the play did find financial backing, and after staging initial performances in New Haven, Connecticut, it reached Broadway.

Not only were successful women playwrights rare at the time, but successful young black women playwrights were virtually unheard of. Within its context, the success of A Raisin in the Sun is particularly stunning.

special note

Compounding the racial challenges the play posed was its length of nearly three hours as it was originally written. Because audiences are not accustomed to plays of such length, especially by a newcomer, a couple of significant scenes were cut from the original production. (These scenes are sometimes included in later renditions.) These scenes include Walter’s bedtime conversation with Travis and the family’s interaction with Mrs. Johnson. In addition, the scene in which Beneatha appears with a “natural” haircut was eliminated in the original version primarily because Diana Sands, the actress, was not attractive enough with this haircut to reinforce the point of the scene. This scene would become more crucial as cultural ideas shifted.

Lorraine Hansberry–>

Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930, and was the first African-American woman to win the Best American Play award from the New York Drama Critics Circle. She was the fifth woman and the youngest American to ever have done so. She was given this award for her play, A Raisin in the Sun, which was written when she was in her twenties, and was first performed on Broadway in 1959.

Lorraine Hansberry started writing when she was a young woman. When she was 22 years old, she declared to her later-to-be husband, Robert Nemiroff:

I am a writer. I am going to write!

Her husband then later became her literary executor (the person in charge of handling her writing) after her early death due to cancer, when she was 34 years old.

When she was a college student, she wrote a piece for her school magazine which foretold the driving concerns which would form the basis for A Raisin in the Sun:

What is it exactly that we Negroes want to see on the screen? The answer is simple reality. We want to see film about a people who live and work like everybody else, but who currently must battle fierce oppression to do so.

Even so, when she had completed writing A Raisin in the Sun, Ms. Hansberry could not quite believe what she had accomplished. As described in her autobiographical work To Be Young, Gifted and Black:

…I had turned the last page out of the typewriter and pressed all the sheets neatly together in a pile, and gone and stretched out face down on the living room floor. I had finished a play; a play I had no reason to think or not think would ever be done; a play that I was sure no one would quite understand…

Where did Lorraine Hansberry get the impetus to carry forward her vision through her writing? As Robert Nemiroff related it, she “had herself as a child been almost killed in such a real-life story”4 as the one depicted in her play.

In addition to these works, Ms. Hansberry also wrote another play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a novel Les Blancs, and Lorraine Hansberry: The Collected Last Plays, in addition to numerous magazine and newspaper articles, and other work in progress, left unfinished when she died. No matter how famous Ms. Hansberry became, though, and no matter how much she achieved during her brief lifetime, she never forgot her commitment to carrying forward her ideals to the young people who would follow her.

When she died, her ex-husband inscribed these lines from her Brustein play on her tombstone:

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care…the why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the how is what must command the living.

Historical Overview

Into what milieu was Lorraine Hansberry born? What was America like when she was growing up? What experiences would she have had as a student? What was this country like when she reached adulthood?

In order to understand the historical background of A Raisin in the Sun, it is necessary to understand the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation decision. That law changed the previous “separate but equal” status of education in the South.

“Separate but equal” meant that until the 1954 ruling, black children and White children were separated into different schools. There were no exceptions to this segregationist policy. Also, public facilities such as parks, theaters, etc., had sections and utilities segregated by race. This was because of what were known as “Jim Crow laws,” which were not real laws, but local statutes which everyone followed.

Until the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling and other civil rights activity in the 1950s, it was very dangerous for people of different races to be friends. Works of literature from that time, such as Strange Fruit by Lillian Smith, depict the outrageous injustice of that time.

In addition, any black person who challenged these Jim Crow statutes in any way was subject to abuse, arrest, or lynching (being hung by a lawless mob). Heroes such as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mrs. Rosa Parks, however, challenged these Jim Crow laws and “separate but equal” protocols through boycotts, marches, and other nonviolent means, which often originated in black churches.

At the time Ms. Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, then, the country was being forced for the first time to truly put into practice Abraham Lincoln’s words in reference to the Civil War freeing the slaves about a century before:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

Even after the school desegregation ruling, however, it took quite some time for the schools in the South to be integrated. Children who tried to go to schools previously off-limits to them were harassed, humiliated, had rocks thrown at them, were set upon by dogs, and otherwise threatened and persecuted. Churches with predominantly black congregations were bombed, and church members, including children, were killed. Families who moved into previously all-white neighborhoods had crosses burned on their front lawns by the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups, and were subject to being terrorized in many other ways.

This situation occurred mainly in the South, but the North was not that much better off when it came to these kinds of injustices; they were just more subtle. It has been said that one of Lorraine Hansberry’s purposes in writing A Raisin in the Sun was to show that things were not much better in the North in the 1950s than they were in the South.

Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff said this of Hansberry’s vision:

…She had to possess a powerful cosmic sense of the magnitude of human struggle in the modern world waged by ordinary men and women. Such battles against themselves and others, against wretchedness, and against fate she believed to be of comparable worth as dramatic material to the woes of ancient kings and queens in whom grave flaws of character led to disaster.

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Jim Crowe and the Harlem Ren

Mr. Naymik — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 14:51:43 +0000

Jim Crow laws made racism legal

The term originated with a traveling show in which a white man imitated stereotypes of African Americans. Later, that name was used in society. For instance, special railroad car on trains were for blacks only and were called “Jim Crow Cars.” This became the standard term for laws and acts designed to promote segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans.

Like slavery before it, people started to reject these ideas. Twain wrote Huck Finn in the 1880s, in part, as a response to the south’s effort to limit economic and physical freedom of freed slaves.

State sanctioned laws, beatings, mob violence, and lynching persisted through the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s. Supreme court said the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional, a law that stated: “That all persons…shall be entitled to full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other public amusement.” Again the Supreme Court, in 1896, said in Plessy v. Ferguson that equal accommodations, even if separate, are just fine. Adding that “separate but equal” accommodations did not stamp the “colored race with a badge of inferiority.”

With government approval, all were free to limit where blacks could vote, eat, drink, socialize and educate.

For more information and images, watch the video below about the Jim Crow Museum

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Harlem Renaissance Explained

Mr. Naymik — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:36:06 +0000

Pivotal publication Survey Graphic helped define the Harlem Renaissance

Our unit on the American Dream begins with an exploration of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem Renaissance (HR) is the name given to the period from the end of World War I and through the middle of the 1930s Depression, during which a group of talented African-American writers and artists produced literature in four areas: poetry, fiction, drama, and essays. However, HR was more than just a literary movement: it included racial consciousness, “the back to Africa” movement led by Marcus Garvey, racial integration, the explosion of music particularly jazz, spirituals and blues, painting, dramatic revues, and others.

We will be focusing mostly on Langston Hughes as we study the Harlem Renaissance. His work ties in with the movement and our theme of the American Dream. In fact, one his poems is the basis for the title

Watch the video below to get an ideas of what it was all about.

One of the essays to come out of this time was “Harlem,” by Alain Locke. It was published in the Survey Graphic, a Harlem magazine. In this essay, Locke explains the nature of Harlem and what it means to the black community. Note the comparisons to Europe’s renaissance. The following file is the excerpt that we read in class:

View images from the era

[Show as slideshow]

We will be discussing the basics in class, but you can read more on the background of the HR here. When Harlem was built in 1904 it was designed for the upper class white community. It consisted of townhouses, luxury apartment buildings and single-family homes. The community was built on speculation, but it was not marketed properly. To the consternation of the developers, there were no buyers. So the area was opened up to the growing Black population around 1914. In the true sense of the word, Harlem was a ghetto, but in its youth it was a somewhat fashionable section of the city with a large Black, middle class population. Because New York is a port city, Blacks from the south, Africa and the West Indies also found their way to Harlem making it a truly cosmopolitan area.

Harlem grew into a center for Black culture where the creative arts in literature, visual art and music flourished. The members of the Harlem Renaissance were often called “New Negroes” because they had a newly found sense of pride in their heritage, a desire for political and social equality in their work as well as a certain love for their community. From the mid -1920s to the mid -1930s, approximately sixteen Black writers published many volumes of poetry and fiction pieces. They used Harlem’s growing popularity as “a unique opportunity to do what reconstruction after the Civil War had not done: create a positive public image of blacks as thinking, creative human beings in American society.

Harlem also became the center of the NAACP, which was founded in 1909 by W.E.B. Du Bois. At this Marcus Garvey founded time, the Urban League, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, UNIA. The purpose of the UNIA was to promote the well being of African Americans. The UNIA newsletter, The Negro World, targeted a different group from the NAACP organ, The Crisis. Unlike the UNIA, the NAACP was open to all people, colored or otherwise. In fact, there were several different white board members on the committee board (Ramparsad 274).

More importantly, the Harlem Renaissance was significant to American urban history because it brought attention to a city that was growing rapidly due to the increase in black population, and to the problems African Americans faced living in New York City.

The Harlem Renaissance artists with the power and forcefulness of their work insisted that the Black person be accepted as “a collaborator and participant in American civilization” in the words of the educator and critic Alain Locke.

Harlem newspapers and journals such as The Crisis, The Survey Graphic and Opportunity published the work of new and established Black writers. Locke is closely associated with the birth of the Harlem Renaissance. As a professor at Howard University, he helped encourage Black writers to explore themes relating the treatment of Blacks by white writers, feelings of alienation, the search for a true home, and the criteria by which African-American writing was evaluated and appreciated (Reuben 2). Also encouraged by the NAACP, many writers “created a blatant social protest trying to break the color barrier by shouting directly into the faces of hatred and unfairness” (Rosenblatt 91). To encourage and support the intellectually gifted young people, the journals sponsored literary contests that encouraged creative production and rewarded it with cash prizes and social introductions to the top writers of the time.

The Harlem Renaissance changed American culture, in general. Because the Harlem Renaissance appealed to a mixed audience, including the white book-buying market, African-American literature gained popularity. Although African-American publications like The Crisis and Opportunity published the work of their own people, the writers of the Harlem Renaissance relied primarily on white publishing houses and white-owned magazines. A chief aim of the Harlem Renaissance was “to push open the door to mainstream white periodicals and publishers” (Africana). There were a number of individuals who deeply disapproved of patronage by wealthy white patrons. Historian, Irvin Huggins, denounced the writers of the Harlem Renaissance “because the intellectuals who defined it became mimics of whites, wearing clothes and using manners of sophisticated whites, earning for themselves reputations as [uppity] from the very people they were supposed to be championing” (Bascom 13). In addition, W.E.B. DuBois was critical of works such as Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), for he thought it appealed to the demands of white readers and publishers.

Zora Neale Hurston, who, for a time, was part of the Harlem Renaissance inner circle, also sustained a seriously battered ego at the hand of her critics. Richard Wright, agreed with critics like Irvin Huggins. Wright criticized Hurston because her work lacked the anger that is so characteristic of his own work. He thought that her little stories were a shameful attempt to appeal to a white audience( Washington xvii).

Source: http://www.chatham.edu/PTI/Twenties/Claytor_01.htm[/slider]

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This is a general test post

Mr. Naymik — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:09:59 +0000

Testing of stuff in this post
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