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Paper 2 critical quotations and context
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RAISIN AND GATSBY CONTEXTS AND CRITICAL QUOTATIONSA Raisin in the Sun contexts
1. HOUSING and SOCIAL CONDITIONS: In 1950, black people had to pay more for less
appropriate places than whites: "While a white family could rent a five-room apartment for
$60 a month in Cicero, for example, a black South Side family of four could pay $56 per
month to live in one half of a two-room flat, infested with rats and roaches, and even well into
the 1960s, without electricity or hot water" (qtd. In Gordon, 2008, p. 125).
2. “The worst housing in the cities was reserved for the black migrants coming from the South.
Owners preferred to rent to white immigrants rather than to Blacks, and the black families
sometimes encountered violence when they tried to move outside their growing ghettos”
- Leonard Dinnerstein (2009)
3. RIOTS: On Wednesday, July 27, 1949 rioting broke out in the 7200 block of South St.
Lawrence Avenue. Arthur Jordan, a Ph.D. candidate had moved into the block, the
first negro to venture south of Seventy-first street in the quiet respectable neighborhood of
Park manor. For days the rioting went on. Women cursed, children jeered, teen-agers hurled
bricks and bottles, and men snarled angrily, “Burn the black bastards out”
(qtd.in M’Baye 2009)
4. HANSBERRY'S FATHER – campaigner - Steven R. Carter, “In 1938, when Lorraine was eight,
her father risked jail to challenge Chicago’s real estate covenants, which legally enforced
housing discrimination, by moving his family into an all-white neighborhood near the
University of Chicago”
5. INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCES: W.E.B Du Bois, the first African American to earn a doctorate
at Harvard, was a frequent visitor to the Hansberry household. He wrote the The Souls of Black
Folk (1903) about the first migration of blacks from the South to the North, but most of
it still applied.
6. "there is almost no community of intellectual life or point of transference where the thoughts
and feelings of one race can come into direct contact and sympathy with the thoughts and
feelings of the other" - Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
7. There had not been much improvement on the first wave of migration from the South to the
North – [Whites and blacks] go to separate churches, they live in separate sections, they are
strictly separated in all public gatherings, they travel separately, and they are beginning to
read different papers and books. To most libraries, lectures, concerts, and
museums, Negroes are either not admitted at all, or on terms peculiarly galling to the pride of
the very classes who might otherwise be attracted. The daily paper chronicles the doings of
the black world from afar with no great regard for accuracy; and so on." Du Bois The Souls of
Black Folk (1903)
8. It is racism that “makes it more difficult for black men to earn a living or spend their earnings
as they will; it gives them poorer school facilities and restricted contact with cultured classes;
and it becomes, throughout the land, a cause and excuse for discontent, lawlessness,
laziness, and injustice” - Du Bois Philadelphia Negro (1899)
9. In Raisin, Du Bois’s idea of an educated black leadership is challenged by Mrs. Johnson, a
neighbor of the Younger family, who asserts that she always “thinks like Booker T. Washington
said that time—‘Education has spoiled many a good plow hand—’”(103). Here, Hansberry
presents Mrs. Johnson’s essentially Southern and old-fashioned viewpoint as a source of
ridicule. Mrs. Johnson misquotes Booker T. Washington (another early black civil rights
politician) to satisfy her own position in society and ignorance. Mbaye, 2009.
Hansberry’s ideas on writing and the world
1. "The intimacy of knowledge that the negro may culturally have of the white Americans does
not exist in the reverse" – Hansberry
2. "The employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house. You see, people get this confused. They think
that the alienation is equal on both sides. It isn’t. We’ve been washing everybody’s underwear
, for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean." - “Liberalism and the Negro” - roundtable
for Commentary magazine.
3. "I don't think there's anything more universal in the world than man's oppression to man"
– Hansberry
4. "Universality I think emerges from truthful identity of what is" – Hansberry
5. "In order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific"
– Hansberry
6. ON SEGREGATION: “the problem is that Negroes are just as segregated in the city of
Chicago now as they were then (earlier in the century) and my father died a disillusioned exile
in another country.” - (Lorraine Hansberry - months before her untimely death - 1964)
7. ON CAPITALISM AND MATERIALISM: Hansberry decried “the villainous and often ridiculous
money values that spill over from the dominant culture” into the black community – “The
Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism”
8. ON LENA/ MAMA: “It is she who, in the mind of the black poet, scrubs the floors of a nation in
order to create Black diplomats and university professors. It is she who, while seeming to cling
to traditional restraints, drives the young on into the fire hoses and one day simply refuses to
move to the back of the bus in Montgomery.”
9. "Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes and life and I think it will help a
lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are - and just as mixed up
- but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks - people who are
the very essence of human dignity." Hansberry in a letter to her mother
10. "There is simply no reason why dreams should dry up like raisins or prunes or anything else in
America. If you will permit me to say so, I believe that we can impose beauty on our future."
Hansberry in a letter to the play's Czechoslovak translator
11. Her family's Supreme Court battle against housing discrimination impressed upon Lorraine
that “above all, there were two things which were never to be betrayed: the family and the
race” Hansberry herself
12. Hansberry's feminism “the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be women,
who are twice oppressed.”
13. "Fiction demands the truth. You have to give a many-sided character...there is no place for
stereotypes. I'm not talking socially or politically, I'm talking as an artist now" Hansberry
ACADEMIC CRITICAL QUOTATIONS ON THE WHOLE PLAY
1. Hansberry compelled NY audiences to confront issues that were hardly discussed in private,
let alone in a public forum and that would soon absorb the country – Huntingdon Theatre
company, Ali Leskowitz
2. At the heart of Raisin, is the universal message of the desire for social progress
amid the differing opinions on how to achieve it – David Robinson
3. BLOOMSBURY PREFACE: In Raisin, Hansberry dares to say that black people have inner lives,
too, and that we are a part of the great human continuum – Bonnie Greer, Preface
4. BLOOMSBURY INTRODUCTION: The play presaged the revolution in black and
women's consciousness – and the revolutionary ferment in Africa – that exploded in the
years following the playwright's death in 1965 to ineradicably alter the social fabric
and consciousness of the nation and the world. Robert Nemiroff
5. The Younger family...buying a home and moving into a "white folks' neighborhood"
[is] actually reflective of the essence of black people's striving and the will to
defeat segregation, discrimination and national oppression." Amiri Baraka
6. THE FINAL STAND: Nicole King described Raisin as one of the black literary
representations that “saw and promoted group solidarity against the diverse
manifestations of white racism and discrimination as important, viable, and as cemented by a
working class rather than a middle-class ideology” (Nicole King)
7. "What appeared to be a capitulation to the quintessential American Dream and the longing
for Black inclusion in it was in fact a deep critique of the American Dream—in particular, the
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