King’s Dream in the Black Working Class

LORRAINE HANSBERRY — A RAISIN IN THE SUN — 1959

This play has become a classic of Black Drama, but because it is a vision of Blacks in America when Martin Luther King’s dream would be a reality. Black Americans are still discriminated against, chased in the streets of some neighborhoods, killed in a way or any other possible way by the police, including Black policemen or policewomen, shot dead on the porch of a house where they are trying to get some help after an accident, shot when jogging too close to the house of white supremacists who consider the hunting season is always open for them to slaughter some Black animals as if they were pigs or cows. The basic fact of this play, the fact that brings the end, is a pure phantasm. A white exclusive neighborhood will never accept a black resident and they will shoot him, her, or them, or they would bomb the house and burn them all. That happens regularly in the US. So, in 1959, moving into a white exclusive neighborhood was not even imaginable for a black family. When I was in Dunn, NC, one morning we learned that a black farming family in Benson, next door, had just been found all dead in their house, and there was on the highway a big sign saying: Welcome to Dunn, A KKK sanctuary. That was in 1969–70.