Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, the youngest of four children. Her parents were well-educated, successful Black citizens who publicly fought discrimination against Black people. When Hansberry was a child, she and her family lived in a Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. During this era, segregation—the enforced separation of white people and Black people—was still legal and widespread throughout the South. Northern states, including Hansberry’s own Illinois, had no official policy of segregation, but they were generally self-segregated along racial and economic lines. Chicago was a striking example of a city carved into strictly divided Black and white neighborhoods. Hansberry’s family became one of the first to move into a white neighborhood, but Hansberry still attended a segregated public school for Black students. When neighbors struck at them with threats of violence and legal action, the Hansberrys defended themselves. Hansberry’s father successfully brought his case all the way to the Supreme Court. Hansberry wrote that she always felt the inclination to record her experiences. At times, her writing—including A Raisin in the Sun—is recognizably autobiographical. She was one of the first playwrights to create realistic portraits of Black life. When A Raisin in the Sun opened in March 1959, it met with great praise from white and Black audience members alike. Arguably the first play to portray Black characters, themes, and conflicts in a natural and realistic manner, A Raisin in the Sun received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play of the Year. Hansberry was the youngest playwright, the fifth woman, and the only Black writer at that point to win the award. She used her new fame to help bring attention to the American civil rights movement as well as African struggles for independence from colonialism. Her promising career was cut short when she died from cancer in 1965, at the age of thirty-four. A Raisin in the Sun can be considered a turning point in American art because it addresses so many issues important during the 1950s in the United States. The 1950s are widely mocked in modern times as an age of complacency and conformism, symbolized by the growth of suburbs and commercial culture that began in that decade. Such a view, however, is superficial at best. Beneath the economic prosperity that characterized America in the years following World War II roiled growing domestic and racial tension. The stereotype of 1950s America as a land of happy housewives and Black people content with their inferior status resulted in an upswell of social resentment that would finally find public voice in the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s. A Raisin in the Sun, first performed as the conservative 1950s slid into the radical sixties, explores both of these vital issues. A Raisin in the Sun was a revolutionary work for its time. Hansberry creates in the Younger family one of the first honest depictions of a Black family on an American stage, in an age when predominantly Black audiences simply did not exist. Before this play, African-American roles, usually small and comedic, largely employed ethnic stereotypes. Hansberry, however, shows an entire Black family in a realistic light, one that is unflattering and far from comedic. She uses Black vernacular throughout the play and broaches important issues and conflicts, such as poverty, discrimination, and the construction of African-American racial identity. A Raisin in the Sun explores not only the tension between white and Black society but also the strain within the Black community over how to react to an oppressive white community. Hansberry’s drama asks difficult questions about assimilation and identity. Through the character of Joseph Asagai, Hansberry reveals a trend toward celebrating African heritage. As he calls for a native revolt in his homeland, she seems to predict the anticolonial struggles in African countries of the upcoming decades, as well as the inevitability and necessity of integration. Hansberry also addressed feminist questions ahead of their time in A Raisin in the Sun. Through the character of Beneatha, Hansberry proposes that marriage is not necessary for women and that women can and should have ambitious career goals. She even approaches an abortion debate, allowing the topic of abortion to enter the action in an era when abortion was illegal. Of course, one of her most radical statements was simply the writing and production of the play—no small feat given her status as a young, Black woman in the 1950s. All of this idealism about race and gender relations boils down to a larger, timeless point—that dreams are crucial. In fact, Hansberry’s play focuses primarily on the dreams driving and motivating its main characters. These dreams function in positive ways, by lifting their minds from their hard work and tough lifestyle, and in negative ways, by creating in them even more dissatisfaction with their present situations. For the most part, however, the negative dreams come from placing emphasis on materialistic goals rather than on familial pride and happiness. Hansberry seems to argue that as long as people attempt to do their best for their families, they can lift each other up. A Raisin in the Sun remains important as a cultural document of a crucial period in American history as well as for the continued debate over racial and gender issues that it has helped spark. A Note on the TitleLorraine Hansberry took the title of A Raisin in the Sun from a line in Langston Hughes’s famous 1951 poem “Harlem: A Dream Deferred.” Hughes was a prominent Black poet during the 1920s Harlem Renaissance in New York City, during which Black artists of all kinds—musicians, poets, writers—gave innovative voices to their personal and cultural experiences. The Harlem Renaissance was a time of immense promise and hopefulness for Black artists, as their efforts were noticed and applauded across the United States. In fact, the 1920s are known to history as the Jazz Age, since that musical form, created by a vanguard of Black musicians, gained immense national popularity during the period and seemed to embody the exuberance and excitement of the decade. The Harlem Renaissance and the positive national response to the art it produced seemed to herald the possibility of a new age of acceptance for blacks in America. Langston Hughes was one of the brightest lights of the Harlem Renaissance, and his poems and essays celebrate Black culture, creativity, and strength. However, Hughes wrote “Harlem” in 1951, twenty years after the Great Depression crushed the Harlem Renaissance and devastated Black communities more terribly than any other group in the United States. In addition, the post–World War II years of the 1950s were characterized by “white flight,” in which whites fled the cities in favor of the rapidly growing suburbs, a place where Black people were often treated as unwelcome. In a time of renewed prosperity, Black people were for the most part left behind. “Harlem” captures the tension between the need for Black expression and the impossibility of that expression because of American society’s oppression of its Black population. In the poem, Hughes asks whether a “dream deferred”—a dream put on hold—withers up “[l]ike a raisin in the sun.” His lines confront the racist and dehumanizing attitude prevalent in American society before the civil rights movement of the 1960s that Black desires and ambitions were, at best, unimportant and should be ignored, and at worst, should be forcibly resisted. His closing rhetorical question—“Or does [a dream deferred] explode?”—is incendiary, a bold statement that the suppression of Black dreams might result in an eruption. It implicitly places the blame for this possible eruption on the oppressive society that forces the dream to be deferred. Hansberry’s reference to Hughes’s poem in her play’s title highlights the importance of dreams in A Raisin in the Sun and the struggle that her characters face to realize their individual dreams, a struggle inextricably tied to the more fundamental Black dream of equality in America.
The post-World War II United States went through a period of unprecedented economic prosperity for many white Americans that coincided with black Americans’ intensifying the struggle for civil rights and economic justice.
Summarize the changes in U.S. society in the years following World War II Key TakeawaysKey Points
Key Terms
Following World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two dominant superpowers, along with the the Soviet Union. The U.S. Senate in a bipartisan vote approved U.S. participation in the United Nations (UN), which marked a turn away from the traditional isolationism of the United States and toward increased international involvement. In 1949, the United States, rejecting the long-standing policy of no military alliances in peacetime, formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance, which continues into the 21st century. In response, the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact of communist states. In August 1949, the Soviets tested their first nuclear weapon, thereby escalating the risk of warfare. Indeed, the threat of mutually assured destruction prevented both powers from going too far, and resulted in proxy wars, most notably in Korea and Vietnam, in which the two sides did not directly confront each other. Within the United States, the Cold War prompted concerns about Communist influence. The unexpected leapfrogging of U.S. technology by the Soviets in 1957 with Sputnik, the first Earth satellite, began the Space Race, won by the Americans as Apollo 11 landed astronauts on the moon in 1969. The angst about the weaknesses of U.S. education led to large-scale federal support for science education and research. Economic ProsperityIn the decades following World War II, the United States became a global influence in economic, political, military, cultural, and technological affairs. Beginning in the 1950s, middle-class culture became obsessed with consumer goods. Increasing numbers of workers enjoyed high wages, larger houses, better schools, and more cars and household technology. The U.S. economy grew dramatically in the post-war period, expanding at an annual rate of 3.5%. The substantial increase in average family income within a generation resulted in millions of office and factory workers being lifted into a growing middle class, enabling them to sustain a standard of living once considered reserved for the wealthy. As noted by scholar Deone Zell, assembly line work paid well, while unionized factory job served as “stepping-stones to the middle class.” By the end of the 1950s, 87% of all U.S. families owned at least one television, 75% owned cars, and 60% owned their homes. By 1960, blue-collar workers had become the biggest buyers of many luxury goods and services. The period from 1946 to 1960 also witnessed a significant increase in the paid leisure time of working people. The 40-hour workweek established by the Fair Labor Standards Act in covered industries became the actual schedule in most workplaces by 1960. The majority of workers also enjoyed paid vacations and industries catering to leisure activities blossomed.
 American family watching TV in 1958, photo by Evert F. Baumgardner for National Archives and Records Administration.: The 1950s witnessed the explosion of a consumer goods economy. By the end of the 1950s, 87% of all U.S. families owned at least one television, 75% owned cars, and 60% owned their homes. Images of prosperous white middle-class families in their suburban homes symbolized the popular narrative of economic stability and traditional family values. Educational outlays were also greater than in other countries while a higher proportion of young people were graduating from high schools and universities than elsewhere in the world, as hundreds of new colleges and universities opened every year. At the advanced level, U.S. science, engineering, and medicine were world-famous. In regard to social welfare, the postwar era saw a considerable improvement in insurance for workers and their dependents against the risks of illness, as private insurance programs like Blue Cross and Blue Shield expanded. With the notable exception of farm and domestic workers, virtually all members of the labor force were covered by Social Security. In 1959, about two-thirds of factory workers and three-fourths of office workers were provided with supplemental private pension plans. Many city dwellers gave up cramped urban apartments for a suburban lifestyle centered on children and housewives, with the male breadwinner commuting to work. By 1960, suburbia encompassed a third of the nation’s population. The growth of suburbs was not only a result of postwar prosperity, but innovations of the single-family housing market with low interest rates on 20- and 30-year mortgages, and low down payments, especially for veterans. William Levitt began a national trend with his use of mass-production techniques to construct a large “Levittown” housing development on Long Island. Meanwhile, the suburban population swelled because of the baby boom; a dramatic increase in fertility in the period of 1942–1957. WomenThe role of women in U.S. society became an issue of particular interest in the post-war years, with marriage and feminine domesticity depicted as the primary goal for the American woman. As women had been forced out of the labor market by men returning from the military service, many chafed at the social expectations of being an idle stay-at-home housewife who cooked, cleaned, shopped, and tended to the children. Marriage rates rose sharply in the 1940s and reached all-time highs. Americans began to marry at a younger age and marriage immediately after high school was becoming commonplace. Women were increasingly under tremendous pressure to marry by the age of 20. The stereotype developed that women were going to college to earn their M.R.S. (Mrs.) degree. In 1963, Betty Friedan publisher her book The Feminine Mystique, which strongly criticized the role of women during the postwar years and was a bestseller and a major catalyst of the new wave of women’s liberation movement. Baby BoomIn 1946, live births in the United States surged from 222,721 in January to 339,499 in October. By the end of the 1940s, about 32 million babies had been born, compared with 24 million in the 1930s. Sylvia Porter, a New York Post columnist, first used the term “boom” to refer to the phenomenon of increased births in the post-war United States in May 1951. Annual births first topped four million in 1954 and did not drop below that figure until 1965, by which time four out of ten Americans were under age 20. Many factors contributed to the baby boom. In the post-war years, couples that could not afford families during the Great Depression made up for lost time. The mood was now optimistic. Unemployment ended and the economy greatly expanded. Millions of veterans returned home and were forced to reintegrate into society. To facilitate the integration process, Congress passed the G.I. Bill of Rights, which encouraged home ownership and investment in higher education through the distribution of loans to veterans at low or zero interest rates. The G.I. Bill enabled record numbers of people to finish high school and attend college. This led to an increase in stock of skills and yielded higher incomes to families. Poverty and DisenfranchisementThe post-World War II prosperity did not extend to everyone. Many Americans continued to live in poverty throughout the 1950s, especially older people and African Americans, the latter of whom continued to earn far less on average than their white counterparts. Immediately after the war, 12 million returning veterans were in need of work, and in many cases could not find it. In addition, labor strikes rocked the nation, in some cases exacerbated by racial tensions due to African Americans having taken jobs during the war and now being faced with irate returning veterans who demanded that they step aside. The huge number of women employed in the workforce in the war were also rapidly cleared out to make room for men. Many blue-collar workers continued to live in poverty, with 30% of those employed in industry. Racial differences were staggering. In 1947, 60% of black families lived below the poverty level (defined in one study as below $3000 in 1968), compared with 23% of white families. In 1968, 23% of black families lived below the poverty level, compared with 9% of white families. Voting rights discrimination remained widespread in the south through the 1950s. Fewer than 10% voted in the Deep South, although a larger proportion voted in the border states, and black Americans were being organized into Democratic machines in the northern cities. Although both parties pledged progress in 1948, the only major development before 1954 was integration of the military. In the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, litigation and lobbying were the focus of integration efforts. The Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and other critical cases led to a shift in tactics, and from 1955 to 1965, “direct action” was the strategy—primarily bus boycotts, sit-ins, freedom rides, and social movements. Brown was a landmark case that explicitly outlawed segregation of public education facilities for black and white Americans, ruling so on the grounds that the doctrine of “separate but equal” public education could never truly provide black Americans with facilities of the same standards available to white Americans. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to prevent school integration at Little Rock Central High School in 1957. President Dwight Eisenhower nationalized state forces and sent in the U.S. Army to enforce federal court orders. Governors Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George Wallace of Alabama physically blocked school doorways at their respective states’ universities. Birmingham’s public safety commissioner Eugene T. “Bull” Connor advocated violence against freedom riders and ordered fire hoses and police dogs turned on demonstrators during the 1963 Birmingham Children’s Crusade. Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County, Alabama, loosed his deputies during the “Bloody Sunday” event of the Selma to Montgomery march, injuring many of the marchers and personally menacing other protesters. Police all across the south arrested civil rights activists on trumped-up charges.
The 1963 March on Washington, photograph by Rowland Scherman for USIA – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.: The intensification of the black struggle for civil rights and economic justice was one of the most important developments in the post-World War II United States. The fate of African Americans did not match the overall sense of optimism and excitement that many white Americans experienced as a result of the post war economic boom. |
In the 1950s, the __________ was the focus of suburban activities and aspirations.
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