NS YET UNBORN Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, premiered on Broadway in 1964. Centered on Sidney Brustein, a Greenwich Village writer, and his tumultuous marriage, the play casts an unflattering light on 1960s bohemian culture and questions political and social progress. The play was less of a critical and commercial hit than A Raisin in the Sun, but Hansberry’s friends and artistic community rallied around the production—because Hansberry had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and her health was failing. The play closed in January 1965, the same night that Hansberry died at the age of 34. Hansberry’s third play, Les Blancs, was incomplete at the time of her death, but Nemiroff posthumously edited and produced it in 1970. The ambitious, epic work explores colonialism and revolution in an unnamed African country. Nemiroff also compiled her other writing—essays, speeches, letters, and diary entries—into a new autobiographical play called To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. Later theater-makers and scholars have admiringly reexamined Sidney Brustein and Les Blancs as works that were too ahead of their time to be appreciated during Hansberry’s short life. Over 600 people filled the Church of the Master in Harlem for Hansberry’s memorial: Paul Robeson, Nina Simone, and Malcolm X were among her mourners, and James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr. sent testimonials. In a message read at Hansberry’s funeral, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: “Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.” King anticipated Hansberry’s lasting literary and political legacy—one we, those “generations yet unborn,” inherit today. —MOLLY FITZMAURICE
return to Nigeria with him to practice medicine and spark anti-colonial revolution.
DREAMS DEFERRED As Lena reflects on Walter Lee and Beneatha’s big dreams, she realizes, “You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched and getting to the North if we could and how to stay alive and still have a pinch of dignity too. Now here come you and Beneatha—talking about things we ain’t never even thought about hardly, me and your daddy.” Lena and Walter, Sr., faced Jim Crow laws and threats of imminent violence in the South. Different, sometimes subtler and sometimes not, manifestations of racism affect her children a generation later. Men like Mr. Lindner dress their overt racism in civility, but what he shrouds in euphemism was often written explicitly into laws to sustain generational poverty, racial segregation, and overpriced rent in Black neighborhoods—to name just a few of the barriers the Youngers face. In one small but pivotal example: Walter Lee loses the money when he entrusts Willy Harris with bribing officials to expedite their liquor license and other paperwork needed to open their store. In contrast, Walter Lee describes seeing “cool, quietlooking restaurants where them white boys are sitting back and talking ’bout things—sitting there turning deals worth millions of dollars,” which is hardly the onerous bureaucracy he loses his family fortune trying to circumnavigate.
Mama decides to cancel their move and stay in the apartment, since now they may not be able to afford the monthly mortgage payments. But Walter Lee has another idea. He invites Karl Lindner back, planning to beg for the white neighbors’ offer by enacting a humiliating minstrel-like stereotype of Black subservience and desperation.
In A Raisin in the Sun, how does systemic oppression defer the Youngers’ dreams?
But when Mr. Lindner arrives, Walter Lee changes his mind. He summons his dignity, refuses the money, and resolves that the family will move into their new home. As the moving men cart boxes, Mama feels proud of her son for finally coming into his own. She lingers in the apartment, looking back on its memories; at the last minute, she grabs the potted plant that she has been carefully tending and painstakingly keeping alive in their tenement’s one window. She carries this symbol of both hope and adversity into their new home, a home which threatens unwelcoming, racist neighbors but promises a garden.
WRITING EXERCISE
—MOLLY FITZMAURICE
What are your dreams? What would you sacrifice to achieve them—and what wouldn’t you? What obstacles do you face in achieving your dreams? How are those obstacles similar or different from those the Youngers face, and why?
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