I can’t believe this even got staged, let alone won a Pulitzer. The whites must be REALLY nasty, then.
The most relevant, though, is Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 Broadway smash, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry based it on her family’s famous NAACP-backed lawsuit Hansberry v. Lee that supported their efforts to buy a house in an all-white Chicago neighborhood she calls “Clybourne Park.”
Raisin is now a standard on school reading lists. Yet after years of living in Chicago, Norris, a Jim Carrey lookalike, asked himself:
” …what if we turned the story around and told it from the opposite angle, the angle of people like my family, the villains, the ones who wanted to keep them out?”
Thus, the first act of Clybourne Park is set in 1959 in the house at 406 Clybourne St. that Hansberry’s heroes are trying to buy. Norris has Raisin’s bad guy, Karl Lindner, try to protectively purchase the house not just from the black family moving in, but also from the white family moving out. (…)
My late in-laws owned a two-flat in Chicago’s working-class white Austin neighborhood. When middle-class black families much like the Hansberrys started to move in during 1967, their less liberal neighbors told them to Sell Now. They vowed to stay and make integration work.
Unfortunately, underclass blacks quickly drove genteel blacks out.
After their small children were mugged three times on the street, my in-laws finally fled in 1970, having lost half their house’s net worth.
