Young, Gifted And Black: The Conflicted Legacy Of The Woman Who Inspired The Song
'A Raisin In The Sun' By Lorraine Hansberry Is A Great Play And Deserves Its Place In The Canon. But Not For The Reasons You Think.
It is 1986 and I am being driven down the notorious Railton Road in a BMW. Railton Road is “the Front Line” where five years earlier the Brixton Riots began, in which 279 police officers and 45 members of the public were injured. A centre of Afro-Caribbean life in South London, it still hasn’t shaken off its reputation as a “no-go area” for other races.
It is not a no-go area for other races because I am in it. On the other hand, peering out of the car window, I can’t see any other white people.
I feel safe. I’m in good hands. The car is being driven by the deputy foreman of the print shop where I work, with his wife sitting beside him in the front passenger seat. Clarence, a pleasantly spoken man, is a pastor in his Church. His wife is a proto-Doreen Lawrence figure — thin, intelligent and tastefully dressed. Both are well-educated by the standards of their generation, and both occupy positions of responsibility in a print shop otherwise racially demarcated like 1940s Mississippi. But — and this is a point that still strikes me with sledgehammer force — at this time, and this place, being deputy foreman of a medium-sized Stockwell print shop is as high as these nice, middle-class, capable people of Afro-Caribbean heritage can ever hope to reach.
In a well-designed story arc, this would be the beat at which a naive beneficiary of white privilege opens her eyes. But truth is messy and I was never unaware of racial injustice. As a child, my brother played happily with his Lego on the living room carpet alongside George, the son of our Church’s African curate, who was the only black child at his primary school and possibly the only black child in the whole of South Wirral.
“George is a nice little boy,” said my mother, relieved that her son had bonded with the curate’s child and not some neglected latchkey kid who’d have to be frisked for concealed Dinky toys on his way out.
There were race riots in her home city before she was born, mostly directed against Chinese laundries in Tiger Bay, a place no one in her family ever ventured even though it was just down the road from Canton where she lived. But she’d also attended talks and concerts given by Colonial students and staff studying at the nearby University of Wales.
Some Surprising Facts About Race In 18th-Century London
As both her childhood and, to an extent, mine can attest, in Britain the cultural live rail isn’t race — it’s religious sectarianism. A non-white person can become the King or Queen of England but even today, a Roman Catholic may not take the throne. The 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act allowed Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament and take public office (Jews followed in 1858), and non-Anglicans were admitted to the Universities in 1871. Yet Anglicans of any race faced no such restrictions: James Townshend, elected for West Looe in Cornwall in 1769, was of mixed British, African and Dutch descent. Richard Beckford, elected MP for Bridport, Dorset, in 1780, was the son of a super-rich plantation owner and an enslaved Jamaican woman. Plantation-owning families, whose centuries-long residence in the Caribbean had rendered their genes suspect to non-islanders, nonetheless packed their daughters off to do a London season. You could — as long as you minded your ps and qs — buy your way into the English gentry.
‘Race’ wasn’t a fixed category in 18th and 19th-century Britain. As with polite, little George playing on the carpet, a lot depended on how you behaved.
As Tomiwa Owolade observes in his book This Is Not America, racism manifests differently in the UK. Not always, and not everywhere, but in Britain the right accent, manners and schooling can take you further than the right skin colour. Tony Sewell, lead author of the groundbreaking Sewell Report, expressed it like this: “[A]lthough racism persists in Britain at all levels, it alone cannot explain racial disparities: they have to be linked to class, geography, family structure and agency.”
A Groundbreaking Play
So, whilst I’ve been curious for a while now about Lorraine Hansberry’s canonical 1959 American drama A Raisin In The Sun, I was also cautious. I didn’t want a woke-saturated 2024 production to leave me furious at being proselytised by a ludicrous and offensive ideology developed out of the bizarre racial conditions across the pond.
I needn’t have worried. Hansberry’s epic slice of Chicago Southside life in the late 1950s is so robust it defies tinkering. It’s genuinely a good play and an historically interesting one too. Premiering at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway in March 1959, it was “the first time a Black woman had taken an original script… to the most famous theatre district in the world.”
In the grand tradition of over-praising female accomplishment, she won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for that season. (Female artists and writers are always being given awards. It doesn’t mean they will be remembered.)
According to her husband Robert Nemiroff’s 1987 introduction to the published text, the complete version comes in at around four-and-a-half hours. Even the original Broadway text was cut for purely practical reasons. And every subsequent director faces the same dilemma — what do I cut and why? Raisin is so chock-full of ideas, talking points and chickens coming home to roost that in less ambitious hands it might easily have delivered several plays. The Playhouse version ended at 10.45 pm and had me sprinting across town to catch my train.
But let’s wind back a little and consider the circumstances in which Hansberry was writing. Slavery was abolished in America during the 1860s. By the 1870s slaves had become sharecroppers, renting small patches of land from their former owners. There was a brief flowering of Afro-American culture before former slave states in the South reimposed outrageously restrictive laws — the Jim Crow laws — at the individual state level.
Oppressive measures were still in force in the South when Lorraine Hansberry was writing in the late 1950s. Former slaves and their descendants had, unsurprisingly, fled north to Chicago to find work — the Great Migration. They did: but the industrial city was far from Shangri La. Afro-Americans competed for production-line jobs and limited housing stock with better-educated European immigrants, who then leapfrogged over a Black population that considered itself practically indigenous. Increasingly onerous racial ‘covenants’ dictated where they could live and the overcrowded South Side, where Raisin is set, became a ghetto.
A Moment In Time
The affluent New York theatre audience of the time, mostly white, would have broadly understood all this. Hansberry is writing after the landmark legal case Brown v. Board of Education, and after Rosa Parks took a seat on the bus.
But neither Malcolm X nor Martin Luther King had yet been assassinated. The Freedom Rides have not yet happened, nor the march on Washington. Barry Gordy has registered the Motown label but the Detroit Sound has not yet conquered the world. It is impossible at that moment to imagine a Black astronaut or a Black (or even ‘black’) President. And in the main Afro-Americans do not think highly of themselves because no one else ever has.
The play opens with the Younger family of Chicago awaiting the arrival of an insurance cheque resulting from the untimely death of their paterfamilias Big Walter. It is a sum of money large enough to solve all their problems — maybe. What is the best way to use it? Conflicting ideas about that is where the drama gains its motor power.
Because this is the ghetto, and coming into money isn’t the unalloyed benefit it would be in a less dog-eat-dog world.
According to Nemiroff, the white audience for that original Broadway production found in Raisin a message that chimed with their own experience. With every day that passed, the American Dream was becoming less about its founding mission and more about owning things. They saw it as a rewrite of Death Of A Salesman (Miller, 1949).
Whereas Afro-Americans understood it as relating to a specifically Afro-American experience that had stripped them of dignity.
Black Intellectual Life
Hansberry understood the pressures of South Side living. But she did not quite belong to it. Her childhood was dominated by the efforts of her father, a successful real-estate broker, to challenge a racially restrictive covenant that prevented him from buying a house in the Woodlawn district of Chicago. Not many households would have been visited by such Black luminaries as poet Langston Hughes (from whose poem the play’s title is taken), athlete Jesse Owen, musician Duke Ellington and megastar Paul Robeson. But hers was. In particular, she came into contact with — and was influenced by — the public intellectual William Edward Burghardt Du Bois.
Du Bois is a pivotal figure in the American Civil Rights movement. Born in 1868, he was the first Afro-American to earn a PhD from Harvard University. He then gained a scholarship to study at the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.
A century earlier he would have gone to Scotland to participate in the Scottish Enlightenment. A few decades later he would have sat at the feet of philosopher Bertrand Russell and economist John Maynard Keynes in Cambridge. But in the 1890s the German universities towered above all others. So he went to Berlin and hoovered up an intellectual tradition that included Herder, Fichte and Hegel.
This tradition, broadly speaking, had two 20th-century flowerings — Marxism and National Socialism. Du Bois, writing when Hitler was still a horrible little kid in short pants, unwittingly brought some of these dreadful ideas back and inserted them into the bloodstream of radical Black ideology. He even published an influential book called The Souls Of Black Folk in 1903.
Black folk comprise a volk, you see. They have a group identity that transcends their individuality and have to be led to freedom by a privileged top layer — the Talented Tenth.
Du Bois was not a Nazi, and neither was Hansberry. But now Afro-American radicals were operating in a somewhat different — more continental European, more Marxist — intellectual climate. The Rev. Martin Luther King, on the other hand, was a Baptist. His ideas were those of a religious non-conformist, rooted in the Puritan aspirations of the American Founding Fathers (mixed in with Gandhi’s successful techniques of non-violence).
So right from its earliest days, the American civil rights movement was a coalition of at least two incompatible strands. One mobilised the Churches and emphasised individual character and conscience. The other is drawn from a political tradition emphasising collective unity and identity that gives rise to a truly diabolical set of tools, up to and including mass murder.
And then, in the 1980s when post-modernism filtered onto American campuses from France — was it any wonder that progressive radicals leapt upon it to create a new form of activism called critical theory? The influential Du Bois had already drunk from some of the same sources as post-modernism. It was a marriage made in hell.
Black — Or American?
The tensions between these two strands of thought are evident in Raisin — one of the reasons why the play has such enduring power. Beneatha, the rebellious teenage daughter who wants to be a doctor, idolises ‘Africa’ — mostly in the shape of an educated and gentlemanly Nigerian, Joseph Asagai, who regularly comes to call. Beneatha dreams of becoming African and shimmies around the room wearing her gifted African clothes. Asagai, amused, explains that in his eyes she’s an American girl.
Beneatha repeatedly informs the world that she is “not an integrationist”. But she is outraged when similar arguments are put into the equivocating mouth of a white man (memorably played by a squirming Jonah Russell) is who on a mission to dissuade the family from settling in a whites-only district.
She informs her mother (soap actress Doreene Blackstock) that she doesn’t believe in God, only to be whacked in the face by that formidable matriarch, who has relied on her religion to get her through unbearably hard times.
Raisin has been called “a kitchen sink drama”. It’s really an “everything including the kitchen sink drama”. It’s all there. Nappy hair. Abortion. The de-masculinisation of Black men and the temptations of the gangsta lifestyle. Stunted opportunities for economic development due to lack of access to capital. The death of God.
We don’t see much overt racism or abuse. The white people are depicted as mostly civil. What is laid bare in this play is the malign effect of structural racism that puts a cap on people’s aspirations. Some of it transfers to the British context, and some of it doesn’t.
All That Jazz
Director Tinuke Craig’s production is careful to avoid a nostalgia-fest. The set, mostly composed of recycled props and found objects, honours the period but is cramped and ugly. Nineteen fifty-nine was a good year for jazz albums but, although jazz is ever-present in the text, her soundtrack is often discordant. Transparent side panels hammer home a message about the lack of privacy and simple dignity in the Younger family’s housing conditions. I noticed a couple of performance glitches that should have been ironed out by press night, but they didn’t detract.
The note of uncontrolled hysteria that crept into the acting briefly during the second half was, I thought, mostly due to a wobble in the writing. A more experienced playwright might have handled that moment when the family’s dreams appear to have come crashing down differently.
And there’s a surprising amount of Africa. Asagai’s revolutionary speeches against the French and the British were expunged from the 1961 film version starring original Broadway cast member Sidney Poitier as Walter. But Craig’s version reinstates them. When Beneatha reflects: “Independent and then what? What about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come into power and plunder and steal the same as before — only now they will be black and do it in the name of the new Independence — WHAT ABOUT THEM?”
Asagai replies: “That will be the problem for another time. First, we must get there.” And it occurs to me that the actor cast for the role, Kenneth Omole, looks a lot like a young Robert Mugabe. This is a sly production which left me shocked that black intellectuals of that time did have a clear view of what would happen when the British and French pulled out. They just didn’t share that knowledge with the celebrating masses.
Raisin doesn’t have a happy ending. It has a brave and hopeful ending. Asagai says: “And perhaps… perhaps I will be a great man… I mean perhaps I will hold on to the substance of truth and find my way always with the right course... and perhaps for it I will be butchered in my bed some night by the servants of empire…”
He’s a man who has already done what every grown-up person with a conscience is ultimately forced to do: hold a meeting with themselves at midnight, in a graveyard or on a blasted heath. He’s worked out what his values are and what he is prepared both to do and to sacrifice.
Unlike Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he doesn’t fail the test.
And it is what the Youngers, particularly Walter, also have to do as the play unfolds. Freedom brings choices. But Walter, sick of poverty and humiliation, is too hungry for quick wins.
Young, Gifted And Black
Du Bois died in liberated Ghana in 1963, aged 95, a pan-African idealist to the last. Hansberry died in 1965, from pancreatic cancer. Her friend Nina Simone wrote a song about her, based on the title of her final play: “To Be Young, Gifted And Black.”
We will never know how Hansberry’s ideas and writing would have developed. She was a feminist before second-wave feminism got going, and well on the way to outing herself as a lesbian. Perhaps, when writing Raisin, her writing-self channelled more than her intellectual-self could comprehend. Perhaps in later life, she would have made an idiot of herself championing fashionable causes.
Or maybe her ferocious intelligence would have kicked in to excoriate subsequent social developments that were disastrous for Black families — like gang culture, welfare-ism and the rise of single motherhood. (Those gangs, ironically contributed to white flight — a small number of out-of-control youths can cause suburban mayhem. Especially if they have guns.)
Walter’s journey, in particular, makes me wonder if she sensed what was coming down the pipe.
Verdict: An important play given a decent production. Leeds Playhouse to Sep 28 (£15-£35), then Oxford Playhouse, Oct 2-5, Lyric Hammersmith, Oct 8-Nov 2 and Nottingham Playhouse Nov 5-16.
Liz Ryan x
Dammit. It's post-modernism not post-structuslism. Every time I discuss these theories I make a stupid, obvious error, like the devil is working. It's updated on the website now.