Raisin in the Sun: Explore: Activism

Hansberry on Racism:

Hansberry responding to protests protests against racist police violence

“It isn’t as if we got up today and said, you know, ‘what can we do to irritate America?’...It’s because that since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote, everything. We’ve tried it all. There isn’t anything that hasn’t been exhausted.  Isn't it rather remarkable that we can talk about a people who were publishing newspapers while they were still in slavery in 1827, you see?"

Hansberry on methods to combat racism:

I think, then, that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on step, and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities. The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children"

Hansberry on racial politics and citizenship:

"And as of today, if I am asked abroad if I am a free citizen of the United States of America, I must only say what is true:  No."

Hansberry on Feminism:

Lorraine Hansberry on women, children, marriage and domesticity:

"The problem then is not that woman has strayed too far from 'her place' but that she has not yet attained it; that her emergence into liberty is, thus far, incomplete, primitive even.  She has gained the teasing expectation of self-fulfillment without the realization of it, because she is herself chained to an ailing social ideology which seeks always to deny her autonomy and more--to delude her belief that that which in fact imprisons her is somehow her fulfillment."

Lorraine Hansberry on discrimination facing women:

"Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race.  Women, like other oppressed groups of one kind or another, have particularly had to pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment of the second class status imposed on us for centuries created and sustained."