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.

But the play has become a classic because of all the rest of the action and drama. For some reasons that are not made explicit, the widow of a working-class Black man receives, after his death we understand is professionally connected, a $10,000 compensation for this death. The widow invests $3,500 on a downpayment for a house in a white exclusive neighborhood and entrusts the remaining $6,500 to her son for him to open a trust fund with $3,000 to pay for the medical studies of Beneatha, his own sister, and use the $3,500 remaining money for his own project which has to do with a liquor store. Of course, he uses the whole $6,500 for his own project, with another poorer man who invests all his savings in the project, and Walter Lee entrusts all his money, their money to a white business partner who disappears with the money. This son Walter Lee amounts to an incompetent business mind and a gullible Black man who thinks all white men or at least some white men can be trusted.