Women’s Studies, 39:451–469, 2010

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2010.484330

LORRAINE HANSBERRY: DEFINING THE LINE BETWEEN

1547-7045Studies
0049-7878
GWST
Women’s Studies, Vol. 39, No. 5, May 2010: pp. 0–0

INTEGRATION AND ASSIMILATION

YOMNA SABER
The Line
Yomna Saber
Between Integration and Assimilation

Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

The 1950s was a vibrant decade for African American writers,

among whom the name of Lorraine Hansberry will always be
remembered. In his evaluation of the American theater in the
twentieth century, Alan Ackerman looks back at the 1950s as a
time that “witnessed . . . a period of dramatic canon formation
(the late Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller,
Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee)” (765). The decade opened
with black critics urging African American writers to broaden
their literary horizons in order to reach the universality of works
written by other American writers. Although Hugh Gloster
claimed in his 1950 essay “Race and the Negro Writer” that the
African American author should not abandon his ethnic character,
he strongly advocated complete integration into the larger Amer-
ican literary tradition. He attacked what he identified as an
“obsession with race” that had long stood in the way of African
American writing in major ways (369). He called for the transcen-
dence of the ”colour line,“ claiming that this was actually
achieved in Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), Willard Motley’s Knock
on Any Door (1947), Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee
(1948), and Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen (1949).
A similar plea for an unmitigated African American integra-
tion was raised in Saunders Redding’s essay “The Negro Writer—
Shadow and Substance.” Redding condemned the same Jim Crow
aesthetic fetters that further imprisoned African American writing
in the 1920s and 1930s in the lure of ”imitativeness,“ ”dialect,“ and
the ”naughty peep-show.“ Clinging to ethnic roots and seeing life
through a racial lens was less and less attractive as African American
writers introduced themselves to ”realistic idealism” and ”scientific

Address correspondence to Yomna Saber, Faculty of Al Alsun (Languages), Ain Shams

University, 1 Rashdan Street, Dokki 12311, Cairo, Egypt. E-mail: aaxys@nottingham.ac.uk

451
452 Yomna Saber

humanism” which enabled them to “see that values were human,

not racial” and that their racial background should only serve to
provide material for their more “universal” works (372).
In 1956, Arthur P. Davis wound up the whole argument and
confirmed that the 1950s was a decade of African American inte-
gration with the opening sentence of his essay: “Integration is the
most vital issue in America today. The word is on every tongue, and
it has acquired all kinds of meanings and connotations” (141).
Davis acknowledged the drastic changes that were appearing in
African American literature that sloughed off the old skin of the
1940s protest tradition and the combination of sociological case-
studies and naturalism in literary works. The call for integration in
the wider culture prompted writers who chose African American
protagonists to depict conflicts within the group instead of laying
all the emphasis on interracial problems. Such works included
Owen Dodson’s Boy at the Window (1951), Gwendolyn Brooks’s
Maud Martha (1953), Richard Wright’s The Outsider (1953), Melvin
Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic (1953), and Langston Hughes’s
Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955). Other works responded more to the new
trend and evaded using African American characters as William
Gardner Smith’s Anger at Innocence (1950), Ann Petry’s Country
Place (1947), and Richard Wright’s Savage Holiday (1954). The call
for integration would confer a universal appeal on African American
writings and lead eventually to full participation in all social, cul-
tural, political, and literary aspects of the American life.
Integration was not to be equated with accommodationist
paradigms or cultural assimilation. Accommodation embraced all
negative implications of resigning to whites and erasing any sense
of racial pride. Assimilation implied a fusion that entailed a
profound and irremediable loss of one’s ethnic identity. In assim-
ilation, the marginalized group identity dissolved into the culture
of the dominant larger group: white America. Integration in the
1950s, however, had the aim of asserting black racial pride. It was
an attempt to cross racial lines and not to see everything through
sharp black–white dichotomies, but to form a kind of racial settle-
ment and to end racial exclusion. Black writers were as American
as anyone else in America, and they had the right to tackle
”white” Euro-centric literary traditions and techniques in order to
carry their works into the realms of universality and to challenge
that universality as normatively white.
 The Line Between Integration and Assimilation 453

During the 1950s, debate over African American integration

became more polarized as the increasing racial tensions and
white antagonism made its achievement seem unattainable. The
emergence of the Civil Rights Movement reflected the African
American endeavor to integrate into American society as citizens
with equal rights. Politically, it was seeking the right to vote;
economically, it was the right to rise above abject poverty; and
socially, it was the right to have desegregated good education,
desegregated housing policies, and to use desegregated public
means of transportation. African American writers increasingly
reflected this huge turmoil in their writings, and although the
target was still integration, it was reflected through the new prism
of the Civil Rights Movement. Ironically, the same turbulent
decade that opened with a white acknowledgement of African
American literary achievement in giving the Pulitzer Prize to a
black writer, Gwendolyn Brooks, for the first time in 1950, ended
with granting Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun
(1959) the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959, making
her the first African American and only the fifth female play-
wright ever to achieve this honor.
This article examines the way the term “integration”
changed in its resonances throughout the decade and looks in
particular at Hansberry’s play. It traces the wider developments in
the African American writers’ stance toward the term, as well as
examining Hansberry’s response to these turbulent circum-
stances and the Civil Rights Movement which, as Joy Abel argues,
“was a battle with which the playwright was well-acquainted and
deeply concerned” (12). Hansberry is not a name that can be
easily forgotten as Theresa May argues, “Hansberry is remem-
bered for her courageous play and its indictment of segregated
access to the American dream” (102). Her successful play made
her one of the key African American female writers during the
Civil Rights Movement who reflected that tumultuous decade in
African American history. Her political consciousness is clearly
traceable in her work. This article attempts to defend her against
accusations of assimilation, since hers was a call for integration.
Hansberry, a marginalized voice in terms of race and gender,
emerges from Chicago—which she once described as “dirty, dis-
mal Dreiseresque”—and from the protest aesthetic landscape of
Richard Wright whose impact is clear in her play (Nemiroff 87).
454 Yomna Saber

Many critics compare her play to Wright’s Native Son as both

works open with an adamant alarm ringing in similar settings of
Chicago’s rat-infested ghettoes, both protagonists are black
chauffeurs working for white masters, and both have dreams
beyond their reach because they face poverty and racism. Jewell
Gresham argues that “A Raisin in the Sun is to black drama what
Wright’s Native Son is to the black novel” (194), and C. Bigsby also
draws the connection, arguing that in both works, the “sense of
desperation is the same” (Second Renaissance 157).
Hansberry strongly believed in Wright’s protest and wanted
her work to deliver a similar message against racism and, like
Wright, she held Marxist-Leninist beliefs that lingered in the
background of her work. She learned the lesson of earlier disillu-
sionment with communism from Wright and Ralph Ellison, but
as Lonne Elder explains, “the god has not failed for her as He
had for Wright” for she managed to create her own socialist con-
sciousness that was irrefutably reflected in her political activism
and plays, and which she kept throughout her short life” (215).
Whereas Wright regarded the African American as “a psychologi-
cal island” (30), Hansberry believed him to be an image that had
been created in the American consciousness and kept in its place
as an “image of the unharried, unconcerned, glandulatory,
simple, rhythmical, amoral, dark creature who was, above all else,
a miracle of sensuality” (Nemiroff 199). This image is what she
held responsible for the status quo faced by blacks and their
continuous exclusion from the larger American society. She felt
that the time was ripe for blacks to replace this image with the
real one and integrate into their homeland.
Hansberry refrained from the dark naturalism and impelling
sociological framework of Wright and looked instead to Langston
Hughes’s optimistic tone and racial pride which are both echoed
in her work.1 Hansberry moved with her drama into an Ibse-
nesque realm of social realism arguing that:

1
Hansberry’s racial pride does not merely stem from the writings of Langston Hugh-
es. In Young, Gifted and Black, she writes about her family through whom she learnt the les-
son that ”we were better than no one but superior to everyone; that we were the products
of the proudest and most mistreated of the races of man.“ Hansberry’s parents were both
political activists and her father ran for Congress in 1940. As she grew up, she saw promi-
nent African American figures like Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes
at parties hosted by her parents.
 The Line Between Integration and Assimilation 455

Naturalism tends to take the world as it is and say: this is what it is, this is
how it happens, it is ‘true’ because we see it every day in life that way—you
know you simply photograph the garbage can. But in realism—I think the
artist is creating what the realistic work imposes on it not only what is but
what is possible . . . because that is part of reality too. So that you get a
much larger potential of what man can do. And it requires much greater
selectivity—you don’t just put everything that seems—you put what you
believe is . . . (Nemiroff 228)

Hansberry’s stance towards naturalism is behind her refusal to

delineate a doomed protagonist in her play. Walter is not
hemmed in naturalistic webs as Bigger, but rather embodies
Hughes’s poem “Harlem” which poses the question:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
.......
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load
Or does it explode? (1267)

While it definitely explodes for Bigger in his naturalistic end on

the gallows, the question remains ambiguously answered in
Hansberry’s realism, despite the allusion in the title of the play,
because it is not clear by the play’s end what happens to the
family’s dream of integration.
A Raisin in the Sun was an immediate success that brought
fame and wealth to its creator. Written in a realistic mode, the
play tells the story of a ghetto family with clashing dreams that
receives a $10,000 insurance check. Though the son loses the
majority of this money in a fraudulent transaction, the family
proudly refuses to sell the new house that the mother bought in
an all-white neighborhood and ends the play by leaving the
ghetto for this new house.
Hansberry was arguably not ground-breaking in either
theme or technique. She recalls watching Sean O’Casey’s Juno
and the Paycock when she was seventeen and how it influenced her
because “the melody was one I had known for a very long while”
456 Yomna Saber

(Nemiroff 65). Her realism also suffers from resorting to the

insurance check as a form of some dues ex machina that mars the
plot’s development and renders an element of unrealism as the
check becomes a magic wand for the family, thus making the
events less credible. However, the play was the first African
American work to be performed on Broadway, attracting huge
numbers of both white and black audiences and much critical
acclaim. The play also served as the platform from which
Hansberry later pursued her short career of political activism.2
Hansberry’s success can be attributed to other factors, however,
which are arguably related to the time her play was released and
her art of characterization.
Hansberry was effective in the literary arena of the theatre
even though African American drama suffered from many
drawbacks that were mainly related to playwrights and audiences.
The 1950s brought about the call for integration and thus as
Geneviève Fabre notes, “in large measure the dramaturgy of the
fifties adopted the civil rights ideology of liberal America. Now
more than ever the audience for black theatre was white; the
dramatists spoke to the white audience directly, for a guilty con-
science predisposed liberals to listen to the voice of the
oppressed”(12). Such plays included William Branch’s In Splendid
Error (1954), Louis Peterson’s Take a Giant Step (1955), and
Loften Mitchell’s A Land beyond the River (1957). But none of
these works achieved, even remotely, the success of A Raisin in the
Sun. The reception of Hansberry’s play depended primarily on its
time. As Margaret Wilkerson argues, “the time was ripe for a play
that could somehow bridge the gap between blacks and whites in
the US while communicating the urgency and necessity of the
civil rights struggle”(A Raisin 444). The play opened in March
1959, putting a black ghetto family on the very threshold of inte-
gration while tackling the theme of dreaming realistically, albeit
humorously, and without resorting to any violence or bleak

2
Before the release of her first play, Hansberry worked as an editor in the leftist
African American newspaper Freedom under the management of Paul Robeson. It was
through the conspicuous success of A Raisin in the Sun that Hansberry started acting as a
spokesperson for the Civil Rights Movement by appearing in interviews, TV programs, par-
ticipating in fundraising events, and giving emotional speeches about the African Ameri-
can struggle in America and the black battles launched in Africa against European
colonialism.
 The Line Between Integration and Assimilation 457

naturalism.3 Whites got the message of the inevitability of integra-

tion, and blacks enjoyed seeing proud characters without the
exotic stigma of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as appreciating
Hansberry’s ability to show that the ghettoes do not necessarily
always produce the likes of Bigger Thomas.
Hansberry’s art of characterization propels the story. She
does not present a black–white conflict per se, but it is always
there lingering in the background without sentimentality or pro-
paganda. She explains her views concerning racism arguing that:

From the moment the first curtain goes up until the Youngers make their
decision at the end, the fact of racial oppression, unspoken and unal-
luded to, other than the fact of how they live, is through the play. It’s ines-
capable. The reason these people are in the ghetto in America is because
they are Negroes. They are discriminated against brutally and horribly, so
that in that sense it’s always there and the basis of many things they feel,
and which they feel because they are just perfectly ordinary human things
between members of a family, are always predicated . . . on the fact that
they live ghettoized lives. (Carter, Hansberry Drama 45)

The one white character who appears in the play is Mr. Lindner
who comes from the “welcome committee” of the new neighbor-
hood to ask the Youngers not to move into it at all: “I want you to
believe me when I tell you that race prejudice simply doesn’t
enter into it. It is a matter of what people of Clybourne Park
believing, rightly or wrongly, as I say, that for all concerned that
our Negro families are happier when they live in their own
communities” (90). The play introduces dual protagonists since
both Walter and Lena are of equal significance in the overall plot
and the subsequent actions. Hansberry approaches the stage with
a legacy of imposing stereotypes that she manages adeptly to
escape by painting vivid and realistic characters. As Elizabeth
Brown-Guillory explains, her “perspectives and portraits are
decidedly different from those of black males and white

3
In Louis Peterson’s Take a Giant Step, a young African American moves into a white
neighborhood and struggles against antagonism. He feels angry at his family for leaving
the black neighborhood, and he goes through psychological ordeals till he finally gets
back to his family and makes peace with them. The play could be read as a plea against in-
tegration while also tackling the theme of African American dreams. While the family is
saved from disintegration, the message is that the time is not ripe yet for African American
integration.
458 Yomna Saber

playwrights” (229). Lena can be regarded as the stereotypical

black mother figure with her strong will and ability to lead but
she is much richer than this.4 Lena’s religion does not make her
hard-hearted and she is never ashamed of displaying her
emotions to her children. Hardships in life do not make her
bitter, and she never gives up on life or quits dreaming. Lena also
escapes subservient passivity by playing a vital role in her chil-
dren’s life instead of lecturing them about how things should be,
without showing them the way to achieve this. She retains her
ability to dream despite all adversities and embraces life with a
unique sense of humor.
In her play, Hansberry steps into the emotional black land-
scape by bringing marginalized figures into the center and by
individualizing stereotypes. Lena’s hold on to her past shapes her
dream. Having escaped the South only to live the Chicagoan
ghettoes, she clings to the idea of a decent house and the salva-
tion promised by religion. She finds her children’s dreams hard
to comprehend:

No . . . something has changed. You something new, boy. In my time we

was worried about not being lynched and getting to the North if we could
and how to stay alive and still have a pinch of dignity too. . . . Now here
come you and Beneatha—talking ’bout things we ain’t never even
thought about hardly, me and your daddy. You ain’t satisfied or proud of
nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of
trouble till you was grown; that you don’t have to ride to work on the back
of nobody’s streetcar—You my children—but how different we done
become. (73)

But Lena manages to bridge the gap with her children and the
generational differences through her familial love. She accepts
changes and acts accordingly while preserving a strong sense of
pride. Knowing her son’s dream of opening a liquor store, Lena
decides to put down a deposit payment for a new house in an

4
In Hansberry Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity, Hansberry does not deny the stereo-
typical portraits of Lena as she describes her character as ”The Black matriarch incarnate:
The bulwark of the Negro family since slavery; the embodiment of the Negro will to tran-
scendence. It is she who, in the mind of the Black poet, scrubs the floors of a nation in or-
der to create Black diplomats and university professors. It is she who, while seeming to
cling to traditional restraints, drives the young on into the fire hoses and one day simply
refuses to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery.”
 The Line Between Integration and Assimilation 459

all-white neighborhood to save her family from disintegration and

to realize her own dream of providing a decent house for them.
She also slaps Beneatha harshly in the face for refusing to acknowl-
edge the existence of God in her mother’s presence. Lena is more
than the rigid matriarch, however, because her nurturing ability is
exceptional. As she realizes the psychological implication of her
act on Walter, she immediately hands him the remaining money to
open up his business and deduct a certain amount for his sister’s
education. Lena builds up her son’s self-esteem and strives to help
her daughter realize her dream of becoming a doctor. It is her
ability both to change and accept changes that endows such dis-
tinction upon Lena.
Much of the tension in the play arises from the conflicting
views of Walter Lee and Lena and, as Wilkerson notes, “Walter
speaks the words and takes the action, but Mama provides the
context” (The Sighted Eyes 10). Walter bears the dreams of many
generations of black suffering, and he demands his place under
the sun of the American dream. The power of dreaming emerges
from his strong sense of pride and, as Charles Washington notes,
it is mainly “his acceptance of American values, rather than
stereotypes, myths, and untruths about Blacks, that enables him
to dream and act in a typically American way” (114). He wants to
shoulder his responsibility and his larger dream is not merely to
open the liquor store and make money, but to provide his family
with shelter and a decent way of living, as dictated by the
paradigms of the American dream reflected in his words to Lena:
“Well, you tell that to my boy tonight when you put him to sleep
on the living-room couch . . . and you tell it to my wife, Mama,
tomorrow when she has to go out of here to look after
somebody’s kids. And tell it to me, Mama, every time we need a
new pair of curtains and I have to watch you go out and work in
somebody’s kitchen” (71–72). Walter’s sense of manhood is
continually threatened by his confinement in this social reality,
yet he never loses his power of dreaming.
Bigsby argues that Walter’s dream is predominantly moti-
vated by a sense of “indignity and self-hatred” and compares his
failure to that of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s play because “far
from rejecting the system which is oppressing him [he] whole-
heartedly embraces it” (Confrontation and Commitment 158,159).
However, it is difficult to see ”self-hatred” in Walter’s actions.
460 Yomna Saber

When he takes the money and feels secure, he joyfully takes Ruth
to the cinema and holds her hand while walking, and he passion-
ately gives his mother a present. It is true that he might show
much anger at times, particularly when he thinks of his menial
job or when Ruth refuses to listen to his big plans, or even when
Beneatha asks for her share in the money. But never does Walter
resort to violence. Even when he learns the news of Harris’s
betrayal and realizes that the money is all gone, he screams madly,
“Man . . . I trusted you . . . Man I put my life in your hands. . . .” but
there is no violence on stage, despite the intense pain of the
whole family (95). Walter does embrace a system that crushes
him, but what other alternative does he have? It is either the
American dream or ghetto wretched hopelessness. Dismayed by
the latter, he yearns for the former. Bigsby also thinks that it is a
“desire for self-respect which had earlier made Walter long for a
liquor store” (Second Renaissance 215). When Lindner offers to
buy the house from him to prevent them intruding upon the
white neighborhood, he defiantly rejects the offer. After losing
his money, Walter is defeated by the huge loss and almost yields
to neighborhood pressure, but his mother’s pride restores his
own. He vehemently declares to Lindner, “what I mean to say is
that we come from a people who had a lot of pride. I mean—we
are very proud people” (103). Pride proves to be the legacy of the
Youngers, and it is likely to have been one of the main elements
that made the play so appealing to its black audiences.
Walter’s character emerges by the end of the play as a black
”Everyman” figure who is poorly educated, living in the ghetto,
and still able to dream and keep a strong sense of self-respect. He
does not go to the worst extremes like Bigger. Walter’s character-
ization embodies Hansberry’s views on her technique of portrayal:

I happen to believe that the most ordinary human being . . . has within him
elements of profundity, of profound anguish. You don’t have to go to the
kings and queens of the earth—I think the Greeks and the Elizabethans did
this because it was a logical concept—but every human being is in enor-
mous conflict about something, even if it’s how to get to work in the morn-
ing and all of that . . . (Nemiroff 139)

Though Hansberry shows the profundity of humanity in Lena

and Walter, this is not the case in the way she handles other
 The Line Between Integration and Assimilation 461

characters in her play. Beneatha’s two suitors, George Murchison

and Asagai, are not fully individualized. They exemplify political
issues and are meant to symbolize two different approaches in
regard to the question of identity and the reaction to white
oppression, and they also mirror Hansberry’s stance towards
these issues.
George Murchison is the son of a well-off African American
business man who enjoys the company and looks of Beneatha who
finds him “so shallow” (63). His way of dressing, his haughty
behavior with Walter, and his utter rejection of Beneatha’s wear-
ing the African costume and not straightening her hair all reflect
his stance towards his own ethnic background and white American
oppression. Even when Beneatha accuses him of being an assimi-
lationist, he does not try to deny it and mocks her African aspira-
tions: “Let’s face it, baby, your heritage is nothing but a bunch of
raggedly-assed spirituals and some grass huts” (76). George is not
given any positive features; even his wealth is rejected by both
Beneatha and Lena who dismiss him for a fool. Besides there are
no signs of the Youngers’ desire to become white. Both Walter and
Ruth are unhappy to know that the new house is in the white area
of Clybourne Park, and Walter comments, “(bitterly) So that’s the
peace and comfort you went out and bought for us today!” even
though Lena’s choice is primarily based on price and not a desire
to become white (80). Beneatha, who in many ways resembles
Hansberry herself, detests George mostly because of his desire to
assimilate, defining an assimilationist as “someone who is willing
to give up his own culture and submerge himself completely in the
dominant, and in this case, oppressive culture!” (76)
This stance against assimilation is further enhanced through
the character of Asagai, the Nigerian student whom Beneatha
approaches because she wants to learn more about her identity.
Through stressing his African roots and racial pride, Hansberry
juxtaposes two black conflicts, one against white racism in Amer-
ica and the other against white colonialism in Africa. Both
battles are launched to attain freedom and claim a black identity.
His presence in the play also poses the question of what Africans
and African Americans might have in common. Asagai brings an
African costume to Beneatha and thinks that her straightened
hair style is a kind of mutilation, saying, “it is true that this is not
so much a profile of a Hollywood queen as perhaps a queen of
462 Yomna Saber

the Nile. . . . But what does it matter? Assimilation is so popular

in your country” (80). He manages to awaken some sort of a qui-
escent nostalgia in her. Hansberry comments on Asagai as a
symbol of “the emergence of an articulate and deeply conscious
colonial intelligentsia in the world . . . he also signifies a hang-
over of something that began in the ’30s, when Negro intellectu-
als first discovered the African past and became aware of it . . .”
She then negates any allusion to Marcus Garvey in Asagai and
avows that her African infatuation remains abstract in the realm
of “poetry and creative arts. I want to reclaim it. Not physically—
I don’t mean to want to move there—but this great culture that
has been lost may very well make decisive contributions to
the development of the world in the next few years” (Carter,
Hansberry Drama 38).
Beneatha’s choice to consider Asagai’s proposal and go to
Africa with him by the end of the play indicates that Hansberry is
not merely creating characters who are assimilationists. However,
in Asagai’s exaggerated reaction when the family loses all the
money, Hansberry seems to be betrayed by her own idealism. The
scenes of soothing Beneatha and the African dance in which
Walter participates with his sister hold little credibility for a realist
work. In his attempt to help Beneatha while crying over her shat-
tered dreams, Asagai is carried away by his black nationalism and
gives a lecture that appears to be somewhat out of context. Asagai
serves as the playwright’s mouthpiece most of the time, and the
enthusiastic way he behaves throughout the play with his utopian
visions and intellectual attitude and nationalist devotion impose
upon him what Carter calls “the aura of a romantic hero” (Images
of Men 161). But despite the flaws in his characterization, he
remains a convincing argument against readings of Hansberry as
an assimilationist.
Nikky Finney argues that Hansberry’s “uncompromising
words took America by storm in 1959,” which rings true on many
levels (217). Despite its Broadway success, A Raisin in the Sun
remains a contentious work. After the family has decided to move
into the new house, the final scene of leaving the ghetto is highly
ambiguous. On one level, the dream of integration is realized,
but on the other level, it is a bad omen of more white hostility on
the horizon. Hansberry’s comments on her play only add to the
ambiguity of its ending:
 The Line Between Integration and Assimilation 463

[If] there are no waving flags and marching songs at the barricades as
Walter marches out with his little battalion, it is not because the battle
lacks nobility. On the contrary, he has picked up his way, still imperfect
and wobbly in his small view of human destiny, what I believe Arthur
Miller once called “the golden thread of history.” He becomes, in spite of
those who are too intrigued with despair and hatred of man to see it, King
Oedipus refusing to tear out his eyes, but attacking the Oracle instead. He
is that last Jewish patriot manning his rifle in the burning ghetto in War-
saw; he is that young girl who swam into sharks to save a friend a few weeks
ago; he is Anne Frank, still believing in people; he is the nine small heroes
of Little Rock; he is a Michelangelo creating David, and Beethoven burst-
ing forth with the Ninth Symphony. He is all those things because he has
finally reached out in his tiny moment and caught that sweet essence
which is human dignity, and it shines like the old star-touched dream that
is in his eyes. (Washington 110)

Hansberry fully comprehends that there are no radical changes

for the Youngers. Walter still works as a chauffeur, Ruth as a
maid. The family is taking the same old furniture, and the unwel-
come presence of Lindner remains. But whereas the question of
integration remains, it is hard to argue that the play closes on
assimilation. Lena is connected to her plant from her first
entrance till the last exit, nurturing it with much tenderness like a
member of the family. This plant becomes a life companion to
Lena and resembles her dream of having a part of the earth as
well as symbolizing her roots. Taking the plant to the new house
implies that the Youngers do not aim to assimilate or accept any
form of uprooting. Walter tells Lindner that they earned this
house through their father’s hard work: “We don’t want to make
no trouble for nobody or fight no causes—but we will try to be
good neighbours. That’s all we got to say. (He looks the man abso-
lutely in the eyes) We don’t want your money” (103). These are not
the words of an assimilationist; Walter finally understands that
the legacy of his father crosses the materialistic boundaries of the
check to the spirit’s boundaries of pride.
Written in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun lies at the crossing point
of two definitions of integration. Hansberry says in an interview
preceding the play’s opening, “I told them this wasn’t a ‘Negro
play.’ It was about honest-to-God, believable, many-sided people
who happened to be Negroes” (Carter, Hansberry Drama 21).
This quotation served as the basis for many critics to accuse
Hansberry of assimilationism. It is true that this is the very same
464 Yomna Saber

view that was highly acclaimed at the beginning of the decade by

critics who urged the African American writer to transcend the
color line in order to reach the universality of white writers.
Declaring that her play does not fall into the category of “Negro
plays” does not necessarily entail assimilation; it can be read as
choosing an oppressed ethnic group to stand for all the minori-
ties in America, which, again, was highly praised by critics as a
sign of integration. Hansberry sets the target of attaining univer-
sality in her work, and she understands that her play presents a
new depiction of African American people on the American
stage. She argues, “I believe that one of the most sound ideas in
dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must
pay great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges
from truthful identity of what is. . . . So I would say it is definitely
a Negro play before it is anything else . . .” (Nemiroff 114).
According to Hansberry, being able to fully grasp the identity of
her marginalized group and to represent it clearly is the shortest
way to reach universality.
Hansberry acknowledges the importance of the white literary
canon in America in relation to African American writers: “I
believe that it is within the cultural descendents of Twain and
Whitman and Melville and O’Neill to listen and absorb them,
along with the totality of the American landscape, and give back
their findings in new art to the great and vigorous institution that
is the American theatre” (Nemiroff 197). This is another aspect
of integration that has been held against her as a sign of betray-
ing the black cause. However, this claim denies the interactions
and connections between the traditionally white canon and the
African American canon, both of which arguably influenced the
other. Hansberry’s view is one that calls for this integration in
depicting humane African American ghetto dwellers who deserve
the reward of integration. The idea of losing black ethnic character
was never among Hansberry’s literary or social agendas, as Kevin
Gaines argues that alongside Mayfield and Du Bois, Hansberry
“posed the question of whether black struggles for equality would
transform and democratize US society, or whether blacks them-
selves would be remade in the image of a stultifying, inequitable,
and militaristic US” (514–15). Her work accuses America of injus-
tice and protects black roots from any winds of assimilation rather
than encouraging a loss of racial identity.
 The Line Between Integration and Assimilation 465

Despite the success of A Raisin in the Sun, some critics

launched harsh attacks against Hansberry’s work mainly based on
her political and social notions of integration. In 1969, from the
vantage point of later developments, Jordan Miller regards her as
an advocate of assimilation by arguing:

Is not Lorraine Hansberry an Uncle (Aunt) Tom? Is not A Raisin in the

Sun a sellout to the white power structure? Are not the Youngers really
betraying themselves and their own? Is not their attempt to assimilate
themselves into the white society, and to force themselves, however,
peacefully, into the neighborhood where they are so obviously
unwanted, simply a gratuitous attempt to become white? Will not the
material world of the white man force them to subject themselves to even
more debasing servility in order to maintain a mere token economic
level within it? (160)

Harold Cruse, however, gives the fiercest critique of Hansberry’s

play. Cruse categorizes the play as propaganda or what he calls
“the politics of accommodation” that started with communist
leadership and reared a whole generation of followers instead of
leaders (269). Thus instead of trying to reflect the real status of
the African American working class, this generation, in which he
places the playwright, attempted to draw an African American
image that met the social aims of leftwing politics. Hansberry
becomes “a full, unadulterated integrationist” by choosing the
wrong family to put on stage (277). This political inclination
widened the gap between the African American intellectual and
the working class. Cruse also is very critical of Hansberry’s back-
ground. He argues that her status as the daughter of a rich
African American who owned a number of properties in
Chicago’s black district negates the “assumption that she knew all
about the Negro working class, of which she was not even
remotely a member”(269). Therefore, Hansberry’s project,
according to Cruse, merely advocates the radical leftwing politics
that never touches upon real African American suffering. For
Cruse, this explains why Hansberry’s characters are not accurate
representations of the ghetto: “The black ghettoes are the spawning
ground for every psychological manifestation of spiritual alien-
ation, and the literary mind that tries to ignore or suppress this
terrible fact is simply not facing realities” (272). Instead of writing
a play that would herald an African American rebellious rejection
466 Yomna Saber

of white oppression, Hansberry gives her audience “a good old-

fashioned, home-spun saga of some good working-class folk in
pursuit of the American Dream . . . thus the Negro made theatre
history with the most cleverly written piece of glorified soap opera
I, personally, have ever seen on stage” (278).
Cruse’s article is written in 1969 and reflects radical changes
in the black scene that clearly affected his views. Attacking Hans-
berry on the grounds of her family ignores the reality of her
upbringing. Hansberry recalls her childhood memories in the
segregated ghetto schools of Chicago saying that, “I am a product
of that system and one result is that—to this day—I cannot count
properly. I do not add, subtract or multiply with ease. Our teach-
ers, devoted and indifferent alike, had to sacrifice something to
make the system work at all” (Nemiroff 36). Cruse’s reading is
limited to class only, which consequently limits his vision to the
political dimension and moves away from the human aspect of
the experience Hansberry depicts in her play. Arguing that the
ghetto can only produce the most mischievous types is quite a
naturalist approach. In his introductory essay to Native Son,
Wright makes it clear that Bigger represents the extreme product
of ghetto conditions, but Bigger is not meant to be a “black
Everyman.” Besides, the one who betrays Walter and runs away
with the family’s money is not a white character; he is Willy
Harris, a different product of the ghetto. Ruth is also very keen
on whipping Travis for being late because she is trying to protect
him from what lies outside. It is equally difficult to accept A Raisin
in the Sun as a soap opera because it steps away from this genre.
James Baldwin regards the play’s theatrical success and unparal-
leled reception as historically unprecedented, arguing, “I have
never in my life seen so many black people in the theatre. And
the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the
American theatre, had so much of the truth of black people’s
lives been seen on stage. Black people ignored the theatre
because the theatre had always ignored them” (xviii).
A Raisin in the Sun had an undeniable impact and ironically
both its flaws and success can be attributed to its timing. It
opened the door to an overflow of strong African American plays
by Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, and others in
the 1960s. Hansberry’s play also had an impact on the wider African
American community during the Civil Rights Movement, which
 The Line Between Integration and Assimilation 467

makes Myisha Priest recall her as both “the first black playwright
on Broadway,” and “a social activist” (118). This is further clari-
fied in her letter to the playwright:

Dear Miss Hansberry,

I am one of the nine students that attended Little Rock Central High
School. . . . I guess you could call this a crude try at my first fan letter. I
wish all the students could have seen the play before entering Central in
’57. It would have made us prouder to enter Central because we knew we
were not the only Walter Lee Younger. (Nemiroff 113)

The play continues to be controversial to this day and as Clayton

Riley argues “Raisin is not a happy work. The questions it raises
are more agonising and complicated than any of the answers it
contains” (206). The symbol of the raisin marks a withering wish,
but the Youngers do leave the ghetto by the end. They keep their
racial pride which might connote that though the grape dries up
in the sun and becomes a raisin, it keeps the sweet taste until the
end. Hansberry regards integration in terms of being seen and
acknowledged in the larger American community. She touches
upon political themes and attacks any inclination towards assimi-
lation as acculturation. Hansberry’s characters display a strong
sense of racial pride and none of them wishes to be white or lose
a black ethnic identity thus “underscoring the idea that the ‘eth-
nic’ is very much a part of the ‘universal’” as Dorothy Chansky
explains (435). The Youngers are going into a white neighbor-
hood because they have earned their new house and they deserve
to improve their life like any other American. Hansberry’s play
tries to locate African Americans in the American Dream. Most of
the attacks against Hansberry were launched in the late 1960s,
where Black Power theorists tried to dissolve the differences
between integration and assimilation. However, the terms were
not coterminous in her work. Hansberry did not betray the black
cause, and her play reflected a deep vision of both African American
and larger American realities without losing racial specificity.

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