Written before the Civil Rights Movement, A Raisin in the Sun exposes the two-layered racism that plagued many African-American communities. The most apparent and blatant form of which stemmed from the baseless xenophobic fears that many whites held. As part of the money that Lena receives from her husband's death, she places a deposit on a house in Clybourne Park, an all-white neighborhood. Representing the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, Mr. Lindner (Scott Mosenson) arrives at the Younger's in the name of friendship and understanding and attempts to bribe them into staying out of his neighborhood. The family refuses, and Mr. Lindner leaves confused and dazed, maliciously hinting that it will be better for the Youngers to stay out.

The other layer of racism is more subtle, yet equally as prevalent and detrimental. Lena's son, Walter Lee Younger (Kevin T. Carroll) unabashedly despises his own race. Claiming that his brethren can only "moan, pray and have babies," Walter places himself above his community. They lack dreams, he says, and he's different because he wants more. He wants to become the new African-American bourgeois, yet he hates them too. The playwright, Lorraine Hansberry demonstrates how this mentality becomes so destructive. Walter becomes so obsessed with his racist views that he eventually begins to embody what he abhors.

Because of the play's setting and events, A Raisin in the Sun is filled with complex characters like Walter Lee. He dreams big, yet partakes in petty squabbles. He places money on a pedestal, yet he freely gives it away without a second thought. He blames everyone for not giving him a chance, yet he loses his family's money on a poorly-planned liquor store venture. He lives for tomorrow's successes, yet cannot make it through today's failures. Even though his contradictions are frustrating, it makes the character more human and thus, more credible. In addition to Walter Lee, Beneatha and Ruth also rise above their own prejudices and live up to their promise, making their struggles and successes a pleasure to witness.

Instead of skirting the issue, Hansberry addresses deep-seeded racism that still prevails in today's world. Through exploring these topics, Hansberry provides rich and colorful characters, whose potential is fulfilled with this cast's adept interpretation and masterful performance.

From: http://www.culvercitynews.org/entertainment/a-raisin-in-the-sun-still-prevalent-today/

Harlem: A Dream Deferred – Langston Hughes

This is a good piece of writing about Harlem Renaissance. 

I found this very long time ago and I didn't keep the link. 

If this is yours, please inform me so I can include your name as credit. 

Lorraine 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. Blacks were often left behind in deteriorating cities, and were unwelcome in the suburbs. In a time of renewed prosperity, blacks 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 underlying theme of Hansberry's Raisin is in the question posed by Langston Hughes' poem "Montage of a Dream Deferred," when he asks, "What happens to a dream deferred?" and then goes on to list the various things that might happen to a person if his dreams are put "on hold," emphasizing that whatever happens to a postponed dream is never good.