A Raisin in the Sun Study Guide

Hansberry was raised in an African-American middle-class family with activist foundations. The granddaughter of a slave and the niece of a prominent African-American professor, Hansberry grew up with a keen awareness of African-American history and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. In 1938 Hansberry’s family moved to an all-white neighborhood in Chicago and suffered violent attacks from neighbors, who had signed a restrictive covenant to exclude black families from the community. Hansberry’s family fought the covenant all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the Hansberrys in 1940. Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin for several years before dropping out and moving to New York in 1950 to pursue writing and social activism. Hansberry’s best-known work, A Raisin in the Sun, premiered in 1959, making her the first African-American female playwright to have a play produced on Broadway. Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at 34, in 1965.

In the 1920s and 30s the discriminatory “Jim Crow” laws in the South prompted many African Americans to relocate to Northern cities, a movement called the Great Migration. Nonetheless, while the North did not have laws demanding policies of segregation be followed, discrimination persisted also in the North, leading to segregated housing, education, and employment. In 1949 the United States Congress passed the National Housing Act to address substandard housing and to provide adequate and more integrated housing options for minorities. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that school segregation was unconstitutional.

Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) describes the life of Bigger Thomas, a poor African-American man who lives in Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s. Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945) discusses the author’s experience of racial discrimination and poverty in twentieth-century Chicago. James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) explore urban African-American life, the question of assimilation, and the realities of Northern racism.