Reimagining Equality

by Anita Hill

  But rarely, even after Hansberry v. Lee, did blacks migrating into cities have equal access to quality housing. And the entire Hansberry family paid a price for the challenge that Carl Hansberry waged against segregation. In time, the federal government would accuse Carl Hansberry of violating the Housing and Rent Act for overcharging blacks for rent in buildings he owned in Chicago’s segregated South Side. Hansberry countered by suing the city’s housing inspectors for defamation. Nevertheless, the suit against Hansberry raised questions about the conditions of his rentals and his integrity as a champion of the rights of African Americans. Whether Mr. Hansberry was the victim of retaliation for his civil rights crusade or a slumlord, as the inspectors alleged, is not clear. In her unpublished letter, Lorraine Hansberry argued that her father’s ill health and premature death were the price he paid for challenging racism.

  By 1959, as inner cities become more and more crowded, the suburbs appeared more and more as an ideal. For over a decade, with the regulatory and design assistance of the federal government, William J. Levitt and other builders had been constructing large-scale low- and middle-cost housing developments throughout the eastern United States. These suburban utopias were popular with veterans and their families, especially those receiving assistance through the GI Bill for down payments. By 1960, according to historian Barbara M. Kelly, the population of suburbs exceeded that of rural and urban areas. In Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown, Kelly explains how Levitt’s simple four-room design became the emblem of postwar housing policies that affirmed racial segregation and the cult of domesticity. Indeed, many Levittown residents entered into the same restrictive covenants that earlier developments had adopted. In 1957 an angry mob in Levittown, Pennsylvania, greeted an African American family moving into the development.

  Resistance from whites notwithstanding, the low cost and relative comfort of the dwellings must have had their appeal to blacks of that era. According to the 1950 census, only 24 percent of the minority population in the country (compared to 64 percent of whites) lived in nondilapidated homes with a private toilet, bath, and hot running water.

  Home in Fact and Fiction

  In 1959 civil rights advancements seemed particularly stalled. Against this backdrop and inspired by her family’s experience, Lorraine Hansberry wrote the play that would become the first drama by a black woman to be performed on Broadway. Despite A Raisin in the Sun’s phenomenal public reception, some critics had difficulty fully grasping its power or masking their condescension toward its author, as suggested by a review in the New York press titled “Housewife’s Play Is a Hit.”10 In the decades since it opened, Hansberry’s signature work has been hailed in some quarters and dismissed in others, but always viewed as a “race play.” Yes, it is a play about a family’s struggle against forces outside their home, but what gives it a timeless quality is the author’s ability to capture the struggles of the individuals inside the home as each tries to find a place within the family. Hansberry took her title from a Langston Hughes poem that asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / . . . Or does it explode?”11 Her play deftly articulates each family member’s dream—as it is shaped by his or her gender, as well as race—and shows us which dreams evaporate and which erupt.

  Clearly, Lorraine Hansberry’s family experience moved her to write the play that would become the iconic representation of the yearning for home. Yet any number of events transpiring outside her own family between 1937 and 1959 might have influenced Hansberry’s thinking about her experience on the front lines of antidiscrimination efforts and thus shaped the message of A Raisin in the Sun.

  In 1944, An American Dilemma, written by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, warned against overlooking race in conceptualizing our democracy. Myrdal’s comprehensive study of the African American experience revealed the fiction of the “separate but equal” doctrine as the best evidence of the inconsistency between the way equality was preached and the way it was practiced throughout the country. The key to his persuasiveness was the case he made for the incompatibility of social inequality with democracy. Myrdal’s exposé focused the country’s attention on the savagery of racial segregation in the South and the dismal state of race relations across the nation. His solution was not to make blacks conform to white America, but to make the American government live up to the principles of freedom and justice it espoused. Myrdal urged the government that had stepped in to save the world from fascism during World War II to account for its role in maintaining the perverse inequalities that had become the norm of existence for people of all minority races.

  Reportedly, Myrdal planned to follow up his report on race with a similar report on gender equality. The Ford Foundation had supported his research on blacks in America, but Myrdal was unable to find funding for an examination of the women of America. What might he have found out about women’s lives in the years following the completion of An American Dilemma? By 1945 six million women, many of them married, had joined the civilian labor force to do the jobs abandoned by men fighting abroad. Despite being told that the men were fighting the war to protect the women back home, and despite the limited opportunities available to them, another 350,000 women enlisted in the army for war duty. But when the servicemen came home, women were advised to leave their lucrative civilian jobs and military positions to return to married life and have babies. With few employment options, most of the white women then complied. Thus many in the Greatest Generation retreated to what was largely white suburbia and gave birth to the baby boom.

  Conformity was an ideal. Marriage was in vogue. Anxious to start families, enlisted men returning from the war urged President Truman’s administration to address the housing shortage problem. They favored new buildings rather than refurbishing old homes. Soon the trend toward suburban housing developments took off, with the government’s blessing and financial support.

  Attracted by better employment opportunities for both men and women, blacks moved to the suburbs too, but separately from and not equally with whites. Housing discrimination limited their residential options, and their own desire to build strong black communities also came into play, as some decided that better housing was a higher priority than integration. Advertisements for homes in black suburban areas extolled the virtues of the nuclear family. In magazine and newspaper spreads, brokers and developers marketed houses equipped with “large, cheerful kitchens” and situated within walking distance of schools and parks, houses where parents could raise their children in a “suburban paradise.” Black-owned publications like Ebony magazine got in on the act. In a 1945 version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Ebony ran articles showcasing the “big, impressive” homes of black suburbia.

  Indeed, blacks had lived in suburban Chicago for decades. In Evanston, an affluent suburb north of the city, black neighborhoods had begun developing in the 1920s. Though some of the residents of these primarily black enclaves were professionals and skilled workers, most were maids, chauffeurs, janitors, and others who provided personal services for the whites in Evanston. As the black population in Evanston grew, whites began to draw residential racial boundaries. By 1959 blacks lived mostly on the town’s west side; suburban migration had stalled for black professionals and was nonexistent for working-class blacks. Despite the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer decision barring racially restrictive covenants, blacks retained a limited suburban presence. Suburban neighborhoods where blacks resided were by and large segregated, and overall the suburbs were white.

  Hansberry had a choice about where to locate the Younger family’s search for home and equality, just as her father had. Situating the family in a white suburb was a deliberate confrontation of the racism that she had witnessed growing up, and the play was largely seen as such. Audiences easily grasp A Raisin in the Sun’s statement about the relationship between blacks and whites and their battle over space. However, little
attention is paid to its clear statement about women’s roles in the struggle for equality.

  In Hansberry’s formative years, gender roles, like racial roles, were well-prescribed. That, too, undoubtedly played a role in her conception of the issues inherent in finding home as she crafted the relationships between the play’s central characters. Women in 1959 households were born into an era in which legislators attempted to prohibit married women from working in twenty-six states, and generally women did not work outside the home even where it was legal. The necessities of World War II had changed attitudes about women working, but during the prosperous peacetime that followed, the government’s policies reflected prewar sentiments about women’s roles. In 1962 Ladies’ Home Journal found that almost all the young women they polled expected to be married by age twenty-two; most wanted to have four children and to stop working after the first.12 In a poll taken in 1977, 88 percent of men over the age of fifty-five thought it “best for the man to achieve outside the home and the woman to take care of home and family.”13

  Magazines and television portrayed married, suburban family life as nothing short of a divine experience for women. Magazine layouts showed smiling housewives happily cooking, vacuuming, and doing the laundry. To convince doubters of how easy and enviable their lives were, they performed these tasks in makeup, pearls, and high heels. Beginning in the late 1950s, CBS, NBC, and ABC contributed to the picture of suburban bliss with sitcoms like Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show, which aired from 1958 until 1966. Donna Stone, Reed’s character—a trained nurse and mother of two married to a physician—was the only one of these sitcom housewives who had any hint of a career.

  Television offered one class deviation from the typical sitcom family in the form of The Honeymooners, featuring a working-class family headed by Ralph Kramden, a Brooklyn bus driver married to Alice, a housewife. In their small and dreary city apartment, they are not nearly as contented as the other TV families. Many of the episodes’ plots center around the couple’s shaky finances, Alice’s criticisms of Ralph’s get-rich-quick scheming, and Ralph’s clenched-fist threats to send Alice “to the moon.” No one seemed to notice that the show’s running gag line involved the intimation of domestic violence. Although the series has become a classic, it ran for only one year. Poverty didn’t sell as much soap as middle-class comfort did.

  But the poverty Hansberry had witnessed in Chicago’s tenements was not unlike that in The Honeymooners’ New York. It gave her, a woman who had grown up in relative economic comfort, ample ammunition to address not only race and gender as she crafted Raisin, but class issues as well. It was against this popular-culture backdrop and the burgeoning civil rights movement that Hansberry set the action of A Raisin in the Sun. The Younger family home, which is the setting for much of the play, is more like the Kramdens’ cramped quarters than the Cleaver and Stone homes or those featured in Ebony.

  In the play, the mother decides that the family will escape their crowded apartment in Chicago’s South Side by using the proceeds of her late husband’s insurance policy to purchase a home in a white residential area. But the trouble in the Younger home is not entirely with the whites who resist their attempt to integrate the restricted neighborhood. Hansberry revealed the Youngers to have internal family conflicts: between Mama and her son, Walter; between Walter and his wife, Ruth; and between Walter and his sister, Beneatha. Mama sees her “family falling . . . to pieces” in front of her eyes. Each member has his or her own idea about how to lift the family, which could be interpreted as the race, from its despair. Walter dreams of getting rich. Mama’s dream of owning a place in the white community with enough space to plant a garden is a somewhat nostalgic vision recalling her and her late husband’s life in the South, but it showcases her courage and integrity. Ruth, a domestic, struggles with Walter, a chauffeur, to get him to see her as something more than a helpmate and producer of his children. She tries to temper his unrealistic expectations of striking it rich with her own pragmatism. Beneatha dreams of healing her people—the family and the race—through education in general, and specifically by becoming a doctor. When Mama entrusts Walter with money for Beneatha’s education, he invests it in an entrepreneurial scheme that turns out to be a complete scam.

  Lofty Goals Undermined by Sexism

  Despite Hansberry’s skillful development of gender dynamics and the role they play in black advancement, it’s no wonder that audiences and critics responded to A Raisin in the Sun largely as a race play. Socially and politically, the country was much more focused on race than on gender. In addition to the great struggle for school integration launched by the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, within five years of the opening of A Raisin in the Sun the country would enact its first major civil rights legislation since the Reconstruction era. In March 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law comprehensive civil rights protections against discrimination in education, employment, and public accommodations. A year later, broad protections against voting discrimination were enacted. Within a few years more, legislation forbidding the kind of housing discrimination that Hansberry protested in her play became national policy.

  The country also began to address the kind of poverty that A Raisin in the Sun exposed. On a sunny day in May 1964, President Johnson announced his plan to tackle the problem of poverty as part of his Great Society initiative. The site was the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, one of the nation’s premier public research and educational institutions. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. stood out among the crowd of mostly white men and a few white women. With the plight of poor people on the national agenda, all eyes were trained on blacks whose impoverished state was exposed during the coverage of their civil rights struggles. Johnson envisioned a Great Society as “a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents,” a vision that rested “on an abundance and liberty for all” and demanded “an end to racial injustice and poverty.”14 Black activists were making a compelling case for antipoverty, civil rights, and education efforts in order to reverse the impact of years of racism. As a consequence, however, over the next few years, poverty imagery would become black, and all black concerns would be linked to the concept of entrenched poverty.15 In 1965 blacks were largely absent from media poverty coverage. Around the time the Great Society launched, the media shifted its focus from white poverty to black poverty. It wasn’t long before 62 percent of the images of the poor in popular magazines were of black people—twice their representation in the population of people living below the poverty level.16

  What happened to Gunnar Myrdal’s caution against making blacks conform to white society? It took a turn he probably could not have predicted when Daniel Patrick Moynihan, assistant secretary of labor, took aim at poverty in 1965 by declaring that black matriarchy had thrown the “Negro” family into a state of crisis that imperiled all of America. Given the prevalence of traditional attitudes about gender roles, it’s not surprising that Moynihan’s recipe for black family success was emulation of the model nuclear suburban family. He prescribed deliberate and immediate government intervention to put black men back to work and back in charge of their homes and communities. Under the government’s proposal, black men would be given economic and educational access if black women agreed to give up theirs, stay home, and raise their children. Patriarchy, Moynihan asserted, would save America from an expanding welfare system, and the “Negro family” from descending into a “tangle of pathology.”17

  Understandably, government-sponsored gender domination held little appeal for many of the women who still bore the scars of government-imposed racial segregation. Moynihan’s assessment of matriarchy in African American communities amounted to a stinging indictment of all black women. Unmarried women became community pariahs; the married woman’s fate was to be subservient in her own home. Moynihan’s plan included no ideas for helping sin
gle women provide for their families, instead condemning them to the social and economic disadvantages that his report purported to address. Had he fully appreciated the grip of sexism combined with racism on the black community, he would have proposed policies that promoted the full participation of both women and men. Instead, his devotion to patriarchy blinded him to the fact that gains in the black community could be undermined if bias of any kind reduced black women to second-class status.

  To strengthen his case, in his report Moynihan quoted a number of observers of the black experience, but only one of them was an African American woman. Dorothy Height, head of the National Council of Negro Women, expressed many black women’s desire that black men be made to feel “important . . . free and able to make [their] contribution in the whole society.”18 Along with Height’s observation, Moynihan cited the comments of a white male sociologist who said that “embittered” black wives were “disgusted” with “dependent husbands.”19 Black women had to be recreated in the image of patriarchy, and Moynihan used such comments as endorsements of the concept, suggesting that women should be, and perhaps wanted to be, dependent on strong black men, certainly not vice versa. As the head of one of the oldest and largest organizations of black women, Height later rejected Moynihan’s conclusion about the role of black women in the recovery of the black community, but her recantation came too late to be heard in the stir following the report’s release.

  While some African American women may have preferred patriarchy and others matriarchy, there are good reasons to believe that many wanted communities in which they were equal to men. Two prominent African American women come to mind as proponents of gender equality at the time. In 1965 Aileen Hernandez was the only woman and the only African American named to the newly formed Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the body charged with enforcing the employment provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When she left the EEOC in 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected Hernandez as its executive vice president. In time, she left NOW over issues of race. Another pioneer civil rights activist, Pauli Murray, made headlines in 1965 when she urged women of all races to march on Washington to assure equal job opportunities for all. This was not a new idea for Murray. Two decades before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Murray advocated for freedom from racial and religious discrimination in employment.20