Raisin in the Sun gets its title from a line in a Langston Hughes poem, “Harlem”:

What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun?
      Or fester like a sore—
      And then run?
      Does it stink like rotten meat?
      Or crust and sugar over—
      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

Raisin in the Sun was the first place produced on Broadway in 1959 written by a Black woman, Lorraine Hansberry, as well as having a Black director, Lloyd Richards.  Throughout the play, each of the main characters has a dream that they would like to see fulfilled.  The arrival of an insurance check for $10,000 (from the death of Big Walter Younger) could just make those dreams a reality for the main characters.  But what is to be done with the money?  That becomes the major focus and source of conflict within the Younger household.  They live in a dingy apartment on the south side of Chicago, and all of them (except Beneatha) are working in menial jobs.  When Mama decides to buy a house, the Clybourne Park Improvement Association sends over Mr. Lindner to offer to buy their house back from them in order to keep their neighborhood white.  This takes place before the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing Act) which would have prohibited such practices.  However, the Youngers and many other urban African Americans are hemmed in by decades of redlining.

The playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, drew on her family’s own experience in the 1930s when they integrated a white neighborhood in Chicago.  This excerpt comes from her autobiography, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black:

“Twenty-five years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation’s ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house. … My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger (pistol), doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.”

Hansberry’s parents had their own American Dream, and they went to court to fight to keep it.

The American Dream has meant a lot to people throughout our history.  For many, it has meant finding a little bit of success, achieving a level of comfort that maybe their parents couldn’t afford.  The promise had always been that if you work hard, keep out of trouble, do your duty to country, then you’ll be rewarded.  Included in this is the concept of upward social mobility, something the Youngers desperately want to do but their neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, comes along to remind them what happens to African Americans who try to move on up.

Writer James Truslow Adams described the American Dream and popularized it in his 1931 book, Epic of America, thusly:

“But there has been also the American dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position… The American dream, that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtlessly counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in the older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class.”

During the time period we’re studying (1929 – 1991), the Dream was put on hold by the Great Depression and World War II but came charging back with the creation of the GI Bill (1944) and the pre-eminence of the American economy after WW2.  Working in a factory during the 1950s – 1970s could allow a man to afford his own home.  Many veterans went to college, and many Americans became entrenched in the middle class after WW2, but not everybody.  That’s what this play is all about – those folks, usually people of color but not always – who did not share in the American Dream.  Not sharing in the American Dream did NOT mean that these people didn’t have dreams, but in many cases, they had to defer those dreams like mentioned in the Hughes poem.  Sometimes, the emotions from not being a part of the American Dream showed themselves in anger, bitterness, or in very rare cases, violence.  In Raisin, we see what happens when that American Dream of the Younger family is threatened and to what lengths they are willing to go to get it.

Your job: 

1. What is your American Dream?  Explain. 
2. Describe the American Dream for each of the four main characters – Walter, Ruth, Mama, and Beneatha – in detail using specific examples from the book. 
3.  How does the play capture the American Dream of ordinary folks?  Explain w/ specific examples from the play.  

Due Thursday, November 1 by class.  400 words minimum for all three questions.