A Raisin in the Sun is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959, which was the first time that happened for a play written by a Black woman and directed by a Black man. Titled after Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," A Raisin in the Sun is set in Washington Park, the division of Woodlawn where Hansberry herself lived with her family (at 6140 S. Rhodes, in a red brick three-flat). Broadly, it is the story of a family's right to dreams and a home.
As the play begins, Mama (Lena) Younger's husband has died, and she is waiting for the $10,000 insurance check. Walter, their son, wants to use the money to open a liquor store so he can support his wife and son, however Mama has religious objections to this. But when the money arrives, after spending a portion on a new house in a 'white neighborhood,' she then gives the rest to Walter for his store, on the condition that he set some aside for his sister Beneatha's education. The plot begins there, and echoes a lawsuit Hansberry's own family filed in 1940 to keep their home. Hansberry remembers how "The first required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile 'white neighborhood' in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house." She remembers her mother patrolling the hallways with a pistol after dark, protecting the four children while Mr. Hansberry fought the lawsuit in court.
A Raisin in the Sun has enjoyed two Broadway revivals, two television specials, and a musical adaptation. Bruce Norris's play Clybourne Park (2010) depicts the white family who sold their house to the Youngers, and Kwame Kwei-Armah's play Beneatha's Place (2013) imagines what happens to Beneatha after A Raisin in the Sun's curtain falls.