Hansberry has Beneatha grappling with key controversies of the period, but also some that had yet to clearly surface. And she grapples with some that will remain with us until society itself is changed: The relationship of the intellectual to the masses. The relationship of African Americans to Africans. The liberation movement itself and the gnawing necessity of black self-respect in its many guises (e.g., straightened hair vs. the natural). Written in 1956 and first seen by audiences in the new revivals, the part of the text in which Beneatha unveils her hairthe perm cut off and she glowing with her original woolly crownprecedes the Afro by a decade. Dialogue between Beneatha and her mother, brother, Asagai and George Murchison digs into all these still-burning concerns.
             Similarly, Walter Lee and Ruth's dialogues lay out his male chauvinism and even self- and group-hate born of the frustration of too many dreams too long deferred: the powerlessness of black people to control their own fate or that of their families in capitalist America where race is place, white is right, and money makes and defines the man. Walter dreams of using his father's insurance money to buy a liquor store. This dream is in conflict not only with the dreams of the Younger women, but with reality. But Walter appreciates only his differences withand blamesthe women. Throughout the work, Hansberry addresses herself to issues that the very young might feel only The Color Purple has raised. Walter's relationship to his wife and sister, and Beneatha's with George and Asagai, gives us a variety of male chauvinismworking class, petty bourgeois, African.
             Asagai, the Nigerian student who courts Beneatha, dreams of the liberation of Africa and even of taking Beneatha there: We will pretend that ... you have only been away for a day. But that's not reality either, though his discussion of the dynamics and dialectics of revolutionand of the continuity of human str...