Lorraine Hansberry Controversy

One of the first things discussed in this class is how we form cities, and the cities, in turn, form us. The real estate agents played on already well-established white racism by renting out homes to black tenants to scare away white homeowners. In time, the value of the neighborhood would plummet, and this would now be a “black neighborhood.” This practice spread throughout Chicago as the black population rose. Whites would try to reclaim the neighborhoods that they believed were rightfully theirs the only way they knew how: violence. They created this invisible line between the blacks and the whites to keep the blacks as far away as possible. However, the black people kept crossing the line and taking over area that was not theirs. This city and the hostility that surrounded it was created by the people, but the segregation and divisiveness that the city emanated caused racial hatred and even more violence.

Tommie Shelby is an American philosopher and a professor of African American studies at Harvard University. In his article “Justice, Deviance, and the Dark Ghetto” Shelby discusses poor, black neighborhoods that have persisted in America for decades due to few public policy efforts to make things better. In his article Shelby brings up two approaches to this dilemma that he opposes. The first is the personal responsibility approach which appeals to American values of hard work and ultimately places blame on the poor rather than the government or society. The Technocratic approach on the other hand does the opposite. It blames the government for failing to fix the social conditions of the poor and refuses to blame the poor themselves even if they have done actions that have not necessarily improved their well-being. Shelby’s approach is a mix between the two. He says that we cannot blame the poor if the injustice of our society has changed the content of their obligations and thus making their behavior reasonable due to the unfair conditions they were subjected to. In other words they are a product of their environment. Shelby wants to get his point across that the existence of ghettos today is evidence that our society impaired by structural injustices and that the ghetto is not only the problem of those living in it, but all of ours.

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on March 19, 1930 Tillman. She was an African American. She was one of four siblings that includes two brothers and one sister. In the 1930’s racism and segregation was prevalent in the time. Her parents were civil rights activist Carl and Nannie Hansberry Tillman. She grew up in the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago's South Side Rane. Her family was one of the wealthy African-American families in Chicago. When she was five years old, her parents got her a fur coat. She wore it to school one day and she got beaten for wearing it. Also when she was eight years old she moved to the white suburbs of Chicago and once her and her family arrived at their new homes they were threatened by mobs of white people. She nearly died after getting hit in the head with a brick. Her father went to court to fight for the legal right to live in that new neighborhood.The Supreme Court case of Hansberry v. Lee Weston Playhouse Theater Company. The characters in A Raisin in the Sun are black and live in Chicago just like Hansberry. The characters are also going through segregation/racism, similar to Hansberry.

On May 19,1930 a set of events was set in motion that an inspiration and touching to many. May 19,1930 Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois, she was the youngest of four kids. Her parents were Nannie and Carl Augustus Hansberry.Nannie and Carl Hansberry were independent, politically active and Republican. Growing up she dealt with many problems involving her race, her family was victims of segregation. The effects of her childhood greatly affected how she went on about her life.

Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to pen a Broadway play. In her writings, she wrote male characters, many of whom were male protagonists. Being the feminist that she was, many people saw Hansberry’s depiction of Black men in one of two ways; either as an unhappy retreat from her feminist concerns or as a negative representation of Black manhood. Throughout her career, in works such as “The Village Voice” and “Les Blancs” Hansberry’s wrote other male characters that showed a progressive, revolutionary movement towards a positive and withstanding view of Black masculinity.

Her first play, A Raisin In the Sun, is based on her childhood experiences of desegregating a white neighborhood. It won the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award as Best Play of the Year. She was the youngest American, the fifth woman and the first black to win the award. Her success opened the floodgates for a generation of modern black actors and writers who were influenced and encouraged by her writing.

Hannah-Jones examines the impact residential segregation: “Cities have largely been abandoned by white Americans, you have massive public housing projects, where nearly everyone in there is black and poor, and even if you’re middle class and black, you can’t move out” (Hannah-Jones, This American Life). Thus the government promoted segregation by redlining black communities, and white Americans moved into suburbs. And although the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was intended to end residential discrimination, Updike and Hannah Jones describe the lack of progress: “We no longer have segregation by law, but we still have segregation by fact, and this moderate view says that there's nothing we can or should do about it” (Hannah-Jones, This American Life). With residential segregation as an absolute fact, black Americans are left to suffer in unescapable ghettos – and often turn to drugs and violence – while white Americans enjoy extreme privilege. Michelle Alexander explores the significance of this discrepancy in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of

In my opinion, there are many reasons on why the Chicago’s Housing Authority’s “Plan for Transformation” creates more problems that it solved. The Plan for Transformation pursues to demolish all low-income high-rise building in Chicago. Because of that, in some ways, the Plan for Transformation are continuing racial and class segregation, as thousands of residents were displaced to the poorer south and west sides of Chicago. Thus, in my opinion, all these situations caused the poor African-Americans to be concentrated at the same place and lead them to have more social ties and denser networks that lead to more crimes and deviance among them.

Lorraine Hansberry, born May 19, 1930, made a very prominent contribution to society in her short lived life. She was born to a middle class family as the youngest of four children. Her father was a successful real estate broker who also founded one of the first Negro banks in Chicago (Adams 247). Lorraine’s mother was a schoolteacher named Nannie Perry who later became a ward committeewoman.

This investigation will analyze to what extent did negative racial encounters in the 1950’s caused the white fight to the suburbs.African Americans began moving into Chicago in great numbers following the Great Depression. Tensions arose as they moved into the city, which sparked many whites to move into neighboring suburbs such as the ones highlighted on the map to your right.(Ebony Magazine 18) Following the great population change were negative racial encounters and segregation.This exhibit will inform others of the point of views of both sides of the White Flight in America beginning in the 1950s.

“For much of black America life seems suspended. In the bleakness of filth and of the inner cities our people go through motions of living. On the street corners jobless men still wait, among the garbage and rats children still play. There are some features to the scene City blocks are ravaged by the riot, the bums and blocked buildings, the empty lots still stand like silent witnesses to their futile anger”(Lusane C ,1994, p.135).

During the Great Black Migration, which lasted from 1916 to 1970, (“Great Migration”) African Americans left the South for the North because of the increasing demand for factory labor after the burst of the First Industrial Revolution. However, the assignment of African American neighborhoods could not accommodate the big increase of population; “black out-migration from the South surged from 197,000 during 1900-1910 to 525,000 during 1910-1920.” (Massey 573) Therefore, some African Americans ended up in the white neighborhoods, and the residential color line crossing infuriated the white in the North, so antiblack riots happened, and the hatred toward African Americans ended up triggering criminal justice. For instance, one of the reasons why the 1919 Chicago riot happened is that the police got an African American arrested while there was a white person who killed an African American by throwing rocks at him. In order to address the chaos caused by riots addressing African Americans’ residential line crossing, in 1924, the National Association of Real Estate Brokers spoke up by “stating that, ‘a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood...members of any race or nationality...whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.’” (Massey 573) Instead of examining the root of black-and-white

Racial segregation has had a long history in Chicago. While separation by nationality had always been apparent in the city, with neighborhoods typically being dominated by a certain ethnicity, no group of Chicagoans experienced the degree of segregation that African Americans faced in everything from the housing districts to public services. Forced to live only in designated areas by de facto segregation, redlining, and other tactics, they had limited chances to escape the cycle of danger and discrimination of the city. Confined to only their deteriorating neighborhoods,they had little chance.

Jonsson adds Ferguson is segregated into one of the 400 villages or municipalities that make up the St. Louis metropolitan area. Jonsson explains the “roots of the riots run deep” as far back as the 1800’s, when the city “divorced itself from the country and closed its borders”. At that time, the “wealth and power was in the city.” Jonsson states, “it was a terrible decision.” St. Louis has always been identified as a city with explicit racial zoning lines and its wealthier, mostly white residents are reluctant to change. Many of the municipalities are extremely small and are made up of poor blacks who “shoulder the brunt of those consequences”, meaning lesser quality housing, education, police protection, and political representation. This “balkanization” is evident in the “black-white wealth gap”, with a study showing the average worth of a white St. Louisan’s estate to be at least 100 times that of black estates. There have been many failed attempts to piece back together some of the smaller communities into one, with the possibility of having better services provided to residents. Jonsson relays words by an American studies professor from the University of Kansas, Clarence Lang, that the unrest in Ferguson has opened the eyes of local residents and elected leaders to “address the history and

force violence against minorities. The debates on immigration control and the segregation of neighborhoods in large cities.