by Anita Hill
Such calls for equality went unheeded as complex historical and social forces, such as slavery, unemployment, lack of education, and crime, combined to make many black women the heads of households. To the extent that it existed, matriarchy was what black women got handed, not what they planned. Whether married or single, black women had a history of family and community leadership. The majority of them worked to help support their families, whatever their marital status. (In 1965, Department of Labor figures showed that 70 percent of black workers were women.) They had learned to be assertive and were more likely than men to pursue an education, in part because of job openings for black women in nonmanagement office positions that were unavailable to black men. Yet they earned less than black men and white women.
Black women’s ability to achieve despite the disadvantages of both their race and their gender should have been a model for everyone. Rather than applaud or even recognize their industriousness, the Moynihan report characterized the success of black women as a threat to black men. If they were attain his ideal, they would have to change their roles in the home and community. To support that call for change, Moynihan’s report portrayed them as embittered women who made black men feel inadequate. And despite their employment rates, the report painted them as women who chose welfare over marriage. Though Congress never implemented the interventions Moynihan suggested, his rhetoric cast black women in a harsh light that placed them in opposition to black men and to American society as a whole for the next decade.
In Search of a New Model of Equality
As I was coming of age in the 1960s, few models of the end game of social progress existed, and those that did rarely included a role for black women. I first saw the movie version of Hansberry’s play on television as a child. The dramatic portrayal of the Younger family offered me my first inside view of the civil rights struggle, as well as one of my first images of a black family on television.
When Raisin premiered on Broadway in 1959, issues of race were being played out with sit-ins and marches aimed at integrating public spaces in the South. Whites opposed to equal rights took the fight into the private and personal spaces where blacks sought refuge—their homes and churches. Two years after the 1961 film version of Raisin debuted, the home of civil rights leader Medgar Evers was firebombed. A month later, in June 1963, Evers was gunned down in his driveway. That same year, four African American girls were killed when Klansmen bombed their church in Birmingham, Alabama, as the congregation prepared for Sunday school.
Home ownership in a previously restricted area, in both fact and fiction, was not so much a finale to the procession toward equality; it represented a new chance to work on long-festering issues. Though the passage of civil rights legislation seemed to evidence an understanding that the fates of all Americans were intertwined, that understanding did not hold when it came to the question of whether people of all races should live together in the same neighborhoods. In 1966, when Martin Luther King brought his movement north to take on racism there, he settled into a black neighborhood in Chicago. His mission: to challenge the city’s persistent and pervasive pattern of housing discrimination.
In Norman Rockwell’s depiction of residential integration, two groups of children—one black, one white—eye each other quizzically, but without apparent hostility, against the backdrop of a moving van. New Kids in the Neighborhood—as the painting, which appeared on the cover of Look magazine in 1967, was called—bore little resemblance to the confrontation Hansberry faced in real life and portrayed in A Raisin in the Sun. Yet it movingly signified a dream that perhaps the artist had for the future—that of America, in the generation of the children he painted, accepting racial integration.
By the mid-1970s the migration of whites from inner cities had changed the populations of neighborhoods in Chicago dramatically. This “white flight” led to the resegregation of neighborhoods and public schools. White rings around black and Latino inner cities became the norm. In 1974, writing in a Supreme Court decision that challenged the school district boundaries in suburban Detroit, Justice Thurgood Marshall lamented that “great metropolitan areas” were being “divided up each into two cities—one white, the other black.”21 The decision the court rendered that day in the case of Milliken v. Bradley only encouraged the division of the races, despite Marshall’s dissent. In 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, public school integration had promised a new era of racial integration. But the court in Milliken refused to allow enforcement of plans that would have combined inner-city and suburban school districts. Thus integration failed, and schools and neighborhoods within and outside major cities became more and more racially isolated.
By 1976, a presidential campaign year, media transformation of poverty into a black and/or a female problem, along with unyielding racial isolation, had paved the way for candidate Ronald Reagan to introduce the public to the Cadillac-driving “welfare queen.” Reagan’s caricature of women on public assistance linked welfare to dishonesty, laziness, and greed, and it helped turn public sentiment against the impoverished and the government programs designed to aid them. His fictional character was, perhaps predictably, from Chicago’s South Side. Despite revelations that the “welfare queen” was not a real person but a composite of individuals who had been caught cheating the system, she became the symbol of more than Reagan’s denouncement of welfare. She became the symbol of the “un-American”—the overtly racialized and gendered polar opposite of Reagan’s supporters, who viewed government as “the problem, not the solution,” as the president himself had put it.
Reagan lost his party’s nomination to Gerald Ford, the incumbent. Ford was defeated in the general election by a white southerner, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, who as a boy had spent many of his summers with a black family in rural Georgia. In 1979 Reagan launched his next presidential campaign in Carter’s backyard. In a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been killed in 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act became law, Reagan promised to restore “states’ rights”—a rallying cry for 1960s segregationists—and reduce government meddling in people’s lives. The reference was better coded than his more blatant welfare-queen allusion, but it too was clearly racial. Moreover, it had the benefit of promising broader policy changes. Even a few years earlier, Reagan might have been dismissed as a carpetbagger for segregationist watchwords; but with the combined support of southerners and middle-class whites, he won the party’s nomination in 1980 and went on to win the election. The South soundly rejected Carter, its native son, for Ronald Reagan, an outsider. Reagan, the Great Communicator, may have sounded more like one of them, even without the southern accent.
By 1983 President Reagan was on his way to a landslide victory over his Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale. He would become one of the most popular presidents in the country’s modern history and transform political representation throughout the South and into the border states. One by one, former Democratic strongholds yielded to the allure of the president’s new kind of Republicanism. Though some states, like Illinois, remained steadfastly Democratic, my home state of Oklahoma, once represented by moderate and even progressive Democrats like Mike Monroney and Fred Harris, joined the Reagan movement. By the end of the 1980s conservative Don Nickles would lead the state’s national congressional delegation as it became increasingly Republican.
From the start of his first term, Ronald Reagan kept his word to states’ rights advocates by pushing back on the federal government’s role in civil rights protection. Administration officials characterized the integration efforts of offices in the Justice, Education, and Labor departments as examples of government excess. In many corners, “rights” and “rights enforcement” were dirty words. And the stories of the “welfare queen” resurfaced. Through them President Reagan was able to portray black women and the homes they headed as the counter to real American life and aspirations. Blacks were includ
ed in the administration, but the successful ones were those who adhered to strict conservative ideology and who were willing to advocate against the welfare system. The first clear illustration that the Justice Department’s efforts to enforce desegregation were winding down came in the form of a decision by Reagan’s attorney general to support tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University despite the school’s written policies that discriminated on the basis of race by prohibiting interracial dating.
That there was a new attitude toward race was evident from the government’s civil rights policies, but just how women would fare in the new administration was initially unclear. One of President Reagan’s historic acts—perhaps his most compelling singular act—was to name the first woman to the United States Supreme Court in 1981. Sandra Day O’Connor’s rise to that position was all the more remarkable because she had been denied jobs in prestigious law firms even though she graduated second in her class from Stanford Law School. When O’Connor was appointed, more than a third of law school graduates were women, in contrast with 3.7 percent in 1963. The number of women law grads had mushroomed in the decades since the civil rights laws were enacted. Despite these increases, and despite O’Connor’s credentials as a top law graduate and a member of the Arizona Court of Appeals, her appointment was noteworthy and even politically risky. No other president had made such a move. Don Nickles informed Reagan that he and other socially conservative senators would not support the mother of two and first woman nominated to the court. In the end she was confirmed unanimously, her home life apparently having assured her Republican detractors that she was sufficiently “profamily.”
O’Connor’s appointment notwithstanding, it became apparent as the Reagan years wore on that the government was not going to mount a rigorous challenge to sexism in education, in the awarding of government contracts, or in any other area. And to be part of the administration, women, like blacks, would have to prove they belonged, that they were not just substantively qualified but ideologically qualified. Under Reagan, women and blacks with a history of advocating for minority or gender rights were eliminated from consideration for government positions.
I would not find my model for home or equality in the politics or law of the seventies and eighties. For a newly licensed lawyer living in Washington, DC, in 1981, that was a profound disappointment. Fortunately for me, America in that decade was more than just Ronald Reagan’s America. Through their literary contributions, black women continued informing the country of a different kind of “homebuilding” among African Americans than that portrayed in political circles.
In 1983 African American writer Alice Walker took center stage with a best-selling novel that revealed the twists and turns, the starts, dead ends, and restarts of the black pursuit of a home in America. The Color Purple, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and an American Book Award, told the tale of a young black woman in the 1930s who embraces life and struggles against sexual abuse, racism, sexism, poverty, and illiteracy to find a home. Walker named her protagonist, Celie, after her own great-great-grandmother, a slave who was raped by her owner and gave birth to his son, Walker’s paternal grandfather, at the age of twelve. Walker’s efforts to capture the sentiments of Celie resonated with many women who, because of race, poverty, or simply the fact that they were women, felt silenced and powerless even within their own households. The quietly dignified character Celie became a new model of black women’s resistance to racial and sexual domination.
In 1985 filmmaker Stephen Spielberg adapted the novel for the screen. Though it received eleven Academy Award nominations, the film won none. Both the novel and the movie had their critics; among them were blacks who found their representations of African Americans stereotyped and sentimental. Walker and Spielberg were both chastised for their portrayal of black men as physically and mentally abusive. One black female critic felt that Walker’s Celie was too passive and unlike the many slave women who had resisted their oppression. In sum, The Color Purple joined A Raisin in the Sun in acclaim and controversy.
In 1983 an estimated two hundred productions of A Raisin in the Sun were mounted to celebrate the play’s twenty-fifth anniversary. In a review of the Chicago production, New York Times critic Frank Rich hailed Hansberry’s ability to see “the present and the future in light of the past.”22 Throughout the years, critics have generally praised Hansberry’s play. Some commended the universality of its messages about family, human dignity, and materialism. Others hailed the work as a “Negro play” about the triumph of racial pride. Many missed that the play is about home: the home in each family member’s dreams for equality versus the real house, a small, three-bedroom dwelling in an unwelcoming neighborhood. Raisin is about the home as a location and as a place to belong, and what occurs when these elements misalign. Hansberry’s actual experience and the drama she crafted from it show that when the location of the struggle for equality is the home, issues related to marriage, childhood, and family are exposed.
The universality of the themes she explored began to emerge in conversations about the drama, though Hansberry would not live to take part in the discussions. (She died in 1965 after a battle with cancer.) The conflict between Walter and Mama frames the play’s debate over materialism and integrity. Walter’s materialism, his desire to own a business and strike it rich, as it plays out is easily read as selfishness. In a passage edited out of the 1959 version but reinstated in the 1983 text, Hansberry shows that what drives Walter is not purely desire for himself, but his dream for his son, Travis. Yet she also shows that even that dream is motivated by Walter’s view of manhood and the role that he thinks women should play. Walter Younger explains his dream for Travis’s education as he imagines his son at seventeen years old “sitting on the floor with the catalogues of all the great schools in America around” him. Once Travis makes his selection, Walter will “hand [his son] the world.”
Hansberry’s biographer, Margaret Wilson, points out how the passage provides Walter’s altruistic justification for his conflict with his mother, wife, and sister. But as Wilson explains, for Walter to realize his dreams he must “buy into a system” of stereotypical gender and class roles. “His image is typical Americana—the independent male who controls the world and around whom the universe revolves. Wife, secretary, gardener, Cadillac, sports car—all are complements to the material universe. His manhood is at stake, he believes, and the women around him with their traditional values are holding him back.”23 It is worth noting that this part of the play is delivered as a monologue and makes clear that Walter’s conflicts are not only with his mother. He quarrels with Ruth as he dreams of ways to become wealthy, eschewing more practical choices for the family. Her prize is a sporty car to do her shopping in. His individualism conflicts with Beneatha’s notions about the common good of the race. Walter finds a place for Ruth in his dream, but writes Beneatha out of the sequence altogether.
One of the most prescient scenes from A Raisin in the Sun brings Beneatha’s and Walter’s conflict to a head. Beneatha explodes into high-mindedness and contempt for her brother. “I look at you and see the final triumph of stupidity in the world.” The fight ends with Beneatha shouting at Walter, who has already left the room in hot pursuit of another path to money: selling the family home to the whites who have offered to buy the Youngers out. Walter rejects Beneatha and the education and kind of knowledge she represents for himself and for her, even though he embraces it for his son.
At the conclusion of A Raisin in the Sun, we get a glimpse of Hansberry’s vision of how equality could be achieved. As the Younger family put aside their differences, they decide to stay in the home Mama has purchased and turn down the white neighbors’ offer to buy out the purchase agreement. The neighborhood representative warns, “I sure hope you people know what you’re getting into.” One cultural critic, Kristin Matthews, not only sees the Youngers’ home as a mirror of black Americans’ struggle to find a place in the na
tion, but also sees the play’s ending as promising the family—read the race—“new life as a unified whole.” This concept of wholeness on the basis of full race and gender equality might enable us to hear Hansberry’s “pluralist call for committed ‘builders’—those willing to use their diverse ‘tools’ in concert to reconstruct vital homes and come closer to realizing the dream deferred: America as ‘home of the brave’ and ‘land of the free.’ ”24
A Raisin in the Sun returned to Broadway in 2004. The success of that production set the stage for an ABC television adaptation of the drama, starring Phylicia Rashad (who won a Tony for her role in the Broadway production), Audra McDonald, and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. Though it was difficult to envision the famously wealthy Combs as Hansberry’s Walter Younger, the presence of the hip-hop icon brought the story up to date even as the play addressed the same issues raised fifty years earlier. Rashad and McDonald, as two black women trying to provide a safe and secure home for their family against the materialism represented by Walter’s character, reminded the audience of the hardships that had fallen on black communities in the 1980s and that had brought them so far afield from Hansberry’s idealized dream.
