A Raisin in the Sun
A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The title comes from the poem "Harlem" (also known as "A Dream Deferred") by Langston Hughes. The story tells a black family's experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn eighborhood as they attempt to "better" themselves with an insurance payout from the death of the father. The New York Drama Critics' Circle named it the best play of 1959.
The slide show will allow you to get some CONTEXT about Lorraine Hansberry and her background, and you'll be able to see A Raisin in the Sun as part of the Civil Rights movement of the late 1950s.
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Writing Assignment:
Choose one of the following writing prompts to write an in-depth essay/analysis of the film. Use this sheet to take notes...
1. What are the dreams of the main characters—Mama, Ruth, Beneatha, and Walter—and how/why are their dreams deferred?
2. Hansberry uses three Symbols: Mama’s Plant, “Eat Your Eggs” and Beneatha’s ever changing interests to represent abstract ideas or concepts. What are these things symbolizing?
3. The play ends with the Younger family in a new home in a white neighborhood. Your goal is to write another Act into the play. How would the neighborhood react? What happens to the Younger family? In what kind of world does the new baby grow up?
1. What are the dreams of the main characters—Mama, Ruth, Beneatha, and Walter—and how/why are their dreams deferred?
2. Hansberry uses three Symbols: Mama’s Plant, “Eat Your Eggs” and Beneatha’s ever changing interests to represent abstract ideas or concepts. What are these things symbolizing?
3. The play ends with the Younger family in a new home in a white neighborhood. Your goal is to write another Act into the play. How would the neighborhood react? What happens to the Younger family? In what kind of world does the new baby grow up?
Character Analysis:
Main Characters:
Walter Lee Younger - The protagonist of the play. Walter is a dreamer. He wants to be rich and devises plans to acquire wealth with his friends, particularly Willy Harris. When the play opens, he wants to invest his father’s insurance money in a new liquor store venture. He spends the rest of the play endlessly preoccupied with discovering a quick solution to his family’s various problems.
Beneatha Younger (“Bennie”) - Mama’s daughter and Walter’s sister. Beneatha is an intellectual. Twenty years old, she attends college and is better educated than the rest of the Younger family. Some of her personal beliefs and views have distanced her from conservative Mama. She dreams of being a doctor and struggles to determine her identity as a well-educated black woman.
Lena Younger (“Mama”) - Walter and Beneatha’s mother. The matriarch of the family, Mama is religious, moral, and maternal. She wants to use her husband’s insurance money as a down payment on a house with a backyard to fulfill her dream for her family to move up in the world.
Ruth Younger - Walter’s wife and Travis’s mother. Ruth takes care of the Youngers’ small apartment. Her marriage to Walter has problems, but she hopes to rekindle their love. She is about thirty, but her weariness makes her seem older. Constantly fighting poverty and domestic troubles, she continues to be an emotionally strong woman. Her almost pessimistic pragmatism helps her to survive.
Secondary Characters:
Travis Younger - Walter and Ruth’s sheltered young son. Travis earns some money by carrying grocery bags and likes to play outside with other neighborhood children, but he has no bedroom and sleeps on the living-room sofa.
Joseph Asagai - A Nigerian student in love with Beneatha. Asagai, as he is often called, is very proud of his African heritage, and Beneatha hopes to learn about her African heritage from him. He eventually proposes marriage to Beneatha and hopes she will return to Nigeria with him.
George Murchison - A wealthy, African-American man who courts Beneatha. The Youngers approve of George, but Beneatha dislikes his willingness to submit to white culture and forget his African heritage. He challenges the thoughts and feelings of other black people through his arrogance and flair for intellectual competition.
Mr. Karl Lindner - The only white character in the play. Mr. Lindner arrives at the Youngers’ apartment from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association. He offers the Youngers a deal to reconsider moving into his (all-white) neighborhood.
Walter Lee Younger - The protagonist of the play. Walter is a dreamer. He wants to be rich and devises plans to acquire wealth with his friends, particularly Willy Harris. When the play opens, he wants to invest his father’s insurance money in a new liquor store venture. He spends the rest of the play endlessly preoccupied with discovering a quick solution to his family’s various problems.
Beneatha Younger (“Bennie”) - Mama’s daughter and Walter’s sister. Beneatha is an intellectual. Twenty years old, she attends college and is better educated than the rest of the Younger family. Some of her personal beliefs and views have distanced her from conservative Mama. She dreams of being a doctor and struggles to determine her identity as a well-educated black woman.
Lena Younger (“Mama”) - Walter and Beneatha’s mother. The matriarch of the family, Mama is religious, moral, and maternal. She wants to use her husband’s insurance money as a down payment on a house with a backyard to fulfill her dream for her family to move up in the world.
Ruth Younger - Walter’s wife and Travis’s mother. Ruth takes care of the Youngers’ small apartment. Her marriage to Walter has problems, but she hopes to rekindle their love. She is about thirty, but her weariness makes her seem older. Constantly fighting poverty and domestic troubles, she continues to be an emotionally strong woman. Her almost pessimistic pragmatism helps her to survive.
Secondary Characters:
Travis Younger - Walter and Ruth’s sheltered young son. Travis earns some money by carrying grocery bags and likes to play outside with other neighborhood children, but he has no bedroom and sleeps on the living-room sofa.
Joseph Asagai - A Nigerian student in love with Beneatha. Asagai, as he is often called, is very proud of his African heritage, and Beneatha hopes to learn about her African heritage from him. He eventually proposes marriage to Beneatha and hopes she will return to Nigeria with him.
George Murchison - A wealthy, African-American man who courts Beneatha. The Youngers approve of George, but Beneatha dislikes his willingness to submit to white culture and forget his African heritage. He challenges the thoughts and feelings of other black people through his arrogance and flair for intellectual competition.
Mr. Karl Lindner - The only white character in the play. Mr. Lindner arrives at the Youngers’ apartment from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association. He offers the Youngers a deal to reconsider moving into his (all-white) neighborhood.
Context/Setting of A Raisin in the Sun: Housing Segregation in 1950s Chicago
HOUSING SEGREGATION IN 1950S SOUTH SIDE CHICAGO (Setting: A Raisin in the Sun)
Already experiencing a population boom after Reconstruction, Chicago was a popular destination for African Americans moving from the South to the North in the early 20th century. In the twenty years from 1890 to 1910, Chicago’s African-American population increased from 15,000 to approximately 40,000 due to the Great Migration. The majority of African-American Chicago residents settled in the South Side neighborhood and, due to discriminatory real estate practices and threats of violence in white neighborhoods, one almost entirely black section of the South Side came to be referred to as the Black Belt. By the mid-20th century, three-quarters of Chicago’s African-American population lived in this area. As new African-American inhabitants moved in, the descendents of prior, mostly Irish, immigrants moved out to the suburbs or relocated to other parts of the city.
Following the Great Depression, new housing structures were rapidly added in Chicago. Most of these were built on the South Side, and many were quite small and overcrowded. These generally included bungalows (small, generally one floor houses), studio apartments, and kitchenette buildings that featured units such as A Raisin in the Sun’s apartment setting. These spaces offered little access to natural sunlight and required the residents on a floor to share a single bathroom. In the late 1940s, the Chicago Housing Authority began to build highrise public housing units on the South Side after white residents objected to an earlier proposal to add the units in less congested parts of the city.
For much of the 20th century, the neighborhood was very racially segregated. During the 1920s and Lorraine Hansberry’s childhood in the 1930s, white home owners banded together to create racially restrictive housing covenants, which stated that residents much be of a particular race in order to live in that neighborhood. The Hansberry family faced one of these covenants in 1938 when they moved into Washington Park, a white section of the South Side. Due to the existing covenant agreed to by the New public housing units in the “Black Belt” on the South Side; photo: City of Chicago 22 Woodlawn Property Owners Association, a state court ordered the Hansberrys to vacate. When they refused, a signatory of the covenant, Anna Lee, sued Lorraine’s father, Carl Hansberry, and Harry H. Pace, an African-American lawyer who had recently purchased a building nearby. A circuit court ruled against Hansberry and Pace, but they pursued their case to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in Hansberry’s favor on a legal technicality, saying that the number of signatories the covenant required to make it valid had not been met. The United States Supreme Court would not rule racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional until 1948. However, even this did not alleviate the challenges African Americans faced in trying to find affordable housing in Chicago as white neighborhood associations discouraged their members from selling to black families. The struggles faced by her family and other African Americans in Chicago had profound impact on Lorraine Hansberry, and clearly inspired her to write A Raisin in the S
Already experiencing a population boom after Reconstruction, Chicago was a popular destination for African Americans moving from the South to the North in the early 20th century. In the twenty years from 1890 to 1910, Chicago’s African-American population increased from 15,000 to approximately 40,000 due to the Great Migration. The majority of African-American Chicago residents settled in the South Side neighborhood and, due to discriminatory real estate practices and threats of violence in white neighborhoods, one almost entirely black section of the South Side came to be referred to as the Black Belt. By the mid-20th century, three-quarters of Chicago’s African-American population lived in this area. As new African-American inhabitants moved in, the descendents of prior, mostly Irish, immigrants moved out to the suburbs or relocated to other parts of the city.
Following the Great Depression, new housing structures were rapidly added in Chicago. Most of these were built on the South Side, and many were quite small and overcrowded. These generally included bungalows (small, generally one floor houses), studio apartments, and kitchenette buildings that featured units such as A Raisin in the Sun’s apartment setting. These spaces offered little access to natural sunlight and required the residents on a floor to share a single bathroom. In the late 1940s, the Chicago Housing Authority began to build highrise public housing units on the South Side after white residents objected to an earlier proposal to add the units in less congested parts of the city.
For much of the 20th century, the neighborhood was very racially segregated. During the 1920s and Lorraine Hansberry’s childhood in the 1930s, white home owners banded together to create racially restrictive housing covenants, which stated that residents much be of a particular race in order to live in that neighborhood. The Hansberry family faced one of these covenants in 1938 when they moved into Washington Park, a white section of the South Side. Due to the existing covenant agreed to by the New public housing units in the “Black Belt” on the South Side; photo: City of Chicago 22 Woodlawn Property Owners Association, a state court ordered the Hansberrys to vacate. When they refused, a signatory of the covenant, Anna Lee, sued Lorraine’s father, Carl Hansberry, and Harry H. Pace, an African-American lawyer who had recently purchased a building nearby. A circuit court ruled against Hansberry and Pace, but they pursued their case to the United States Supreme Court, which ruled in Hansberry’s favor on a legal technicality, saying that the number of signatories the covenant required to make it valid had not been met. The United States Supreme Court would not rule racially restrictive covenants unconstitutional until 1948. However, even this did not alleviate the challenges African Americans faced in trying to find affordable housing in Chicago as white neighborhood associations discouraged their members from selling to black families. The struggles faced by her family and other African Americans in Chicago had profound impact on Lorraine Hansberry, and clearly inspired her to write A Raisin in the S