Change Is Fictitiously Slow In The USA

LORRAINE HANSBERRY — THE SIGN IN SIDNEY BRUSTEIN’S WINDOW — 1964–1986

This play was produced for the first time by Robert Nemiroff in 1964. Lorraine Hansberry wanted to modify some passages and even add here and there some modifications. She died soon after this production. It is not even clear she saw the premiere. The text available today is the play modified for a second production by Robert Nemiroff, Lorraine Hansberry’s literary executor. Lorraine Hansberry explains how in 1964 and a couple of years before, intellectuals in Greenwich Village in New York were living in a difficult period due to their desire to change the world, even to be revolutionary, and yet they were confronted with the harsh reality of the Cold War at the time. The play is a metaphor for these intellectuals in this situation of 1964. The war in Algeria was finished and it came to a close in 1962 with the independence of the country from French colonial rule and a compromise negotiated with Ben Bella brought out of prison for the occasion. The independence of Algeria was ratified by two referendums in France and Algeria. On the French side, the approval rate was 90.7%

Then in the same period, we have the events of Birmingham. “The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was an American movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama.” Along the same line we have the famous March On Washington DC and Martin Luther King’s speech, “I Have a Dream.” But this period is also the period when Fidel Castro won the battle for the Cuban revolution in January 1959, and the subsequent Bay of Pigs Invasion that was “a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban Democratic Revolutionary Front, consisting of Cuban exiles who opposed Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution, covertly financed and directed by the U.S. government (April 17, 1961 — April 20, 1961).” This event caused another subsequent development. “The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis in Cuba, or the Missile Scare, was a 13-day confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in…