Raisin in the Sun

Quiz #1

• Let’s start with you and the issue of characters with whom you can identify. Choose one and find a line said by that character which you might (in some other life or circumstances or even in this life) say or have said. Write it down. Alternatively, ask a question that you have about Act 1. That is your quiz for today 8 out of 10. If you have a printed copy of Raisin, you will get an additional 2 points for a perfect 10.

Hansberry herself – 1930-65

• Born into an upper-class African-American family who lived in Chicago

• When she was a little girl, her father tried to move into a white neighborhood. A person against that threw a brick through their window and almost killed Lorraine.

• Eventually, it became a Supreme Court Case: Hansberry vs. Lee.

Good news & bad news

• Her father died when she was only 13

• After college she went to New York and became a journalist. She also was trying to write plays.

• Her very first play was Raisin in the Sun and it first was produced off-Broadway and then, in 1959, on Broadway, where it won the New York Critics award for best play of the season.

Truth behind the facade

• Hansberry married the editor of our book, Robert Nemiroff (white) and they worked together until she died.

• However, there have been revelations of her diaries and letters that show she was actually in love with a woman, and that’s why they say she and Nemiroff collaborated and other words like that.

• Wrote other significant works: The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and To Be Young, Gifted, and Black

• Died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.

Redlining

The Year 1959 – Raisin in the Sun

• 1959 – after Brown vs. Board of Education but before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, or the March on Washington.

• Redlining was outlawed in Chicago in 1974 (6 years after Dr. King was assassinated and one of his main efforts had been to improve housing in Chicago)

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Definition

• Redlining is the practice of denying, or charging more for, services such as banking, insurance,[2] access to health care,[3] or even supermarkets,[4] or denying jobs to residents in particular, often racially determined,[5] areas. The term "redlining" was coined in the late 1960s by John McKnight, a sociologist and community activist.[6] It refers to the practice of marking a red line on a map to delineate the area where banks would not invest; later the term was applied to discrimination against a particular group of people (usually by race or sex) irrespective of geography.

• During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were black inner city neighborhoods. (“Redlining.” Wikipedia.com. )

Redlining against many groups

• Such maps defined many minority neighborhoods in cities as ineligible to receive financing. The maps were based on assumptions about the community, not accurate assessments of an individual's or household's ability to satisfy standard lending criteria. Since African Americans were unwelcome in white neighborhoods, which frequently instituted racial restrictive covenants to keep them out, the policy effectively meant that blacks could not secure mortgage loans at all. At various times the practice also affected other ethnic groups, including Jews, Latinos, and Asians. (“Redlining.” Wikipedia)

You answer:

• What are the indicators in the play that the family’s housing is substandard?

• What other needs do different people in the play have?

• What other needs does the family as a whole have?

After watching scene

• Who wants what?

• How are their goals in conflict?

• What needs to happen for them to each get what they want?

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Dramatic Literature Vocab.

• Foil

• Protagonist

• Naturalism

• Hubris/ Hybris

• Hamartia

• Peripeteia

Freytag’s Pyramid

Conflict

• Essential to a scene in drama: conflict because two of the characters want different, sometimes opposite things, or have different/ opposite goals. Every scene is like a fight, with a winner and loser.

Does Raisin still work?

• The place of Raisin in American theater and world theater

• Won Tonys on Broadway in 2014: Best Revival, Best Direction, Best Performance by a featured actress – won

• Denzel Washington played Walter and did not win

• Best supporting actress and best leading actress, nominated

• A revival in London was widely praised, too.

History rolls on• 1954 – Brown vs. Board of Education

• 1955-56 – Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by Rosa Parks and women but the public voice was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

• 1959 – A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry debuts on Broadway. It wins the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play.

• 1960 – Sit-ins begin

• 1961 – Freedom Rides organized and a film of Raisin in the Sun is made

• 1962 – James Meredith enrolls at the University of Mississippi

• 1962 – Malcolm X becomes National Minister of the Nation of Islam

• 1963 – Assassination of Medgar Evers

And on

• Birmingham protests – 2000 children in jail

• March on Washington Aug. 28

• Bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church – September 4 little girls killed

• November – Kennedy assassinated in Texas

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• 1964 – Civil Rights Bill finally passed and Dr. King gets the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person ever to get it

• 1965 – Malcolm X assassinated and Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer.

• 1966 – MLK goes to Chicago to try to get fair housing and also comes out against the war in Vietnam

• 1968 – MLK assassinated and later Bobby Kennedy, who is running for President to replace his brother, Jack

What comes next?

Work Cited

• “Redlining.” Wikipedia. 2 Sept. 2015. Web. 22• Sept. 2015.