-Martin Luther King, Jr
             The "American Dream" has been a part of our great nation since its conception. A dream which is to each American unique, but to many Americans, a dream, is all it will remain. This play looks at how racism and oppression have diluted the possibility of the "American Dream" for Americans of color, and how the social, political, and economic state of the 1950's played it's role in our history.
             Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun was a personal look at what the "American Dream" was to an African-American family, the Youngers, in the 1950's, and showed not only their struggles to overcome oppression but the value and purpose of dreams, and how those struggles and dreams affected them each in their own way, only to unite them in the end.
             The play was the first to show African Americans in real life situations, and touched on some very sensitive subjects for the time it was written. Issues like segregation, abortion, women's rights, poverty, and discrimination against blacks, to name a few, were not hot topics in a time when most white Americans viewed blacks as inferior. Hansberry was definitely ahead of her time, and she set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1960's.
             The Younger family is a typical poor African American family living on Chicago's South Side. All the family members work together doing servant and manual labor jobs, but they all have their own dreams they would like to see come to pass. The family is due to receive a large insurance settlement from the death of Mr. Younger, and this money is the catalyst for which Walter, the protagonist of the play, is exposed to his fatal flaw. Walter feels oppressed by the world around him, but can only find blame in his wife Ruth. He can't seem to place the blame where it really belongs. Ruth a...