Robert Nemiroff (New York: Signet, 1969), pp. James Baldwin, “Introduction,” in To Be Young, Gifted and Black, ed. Perhaps James Baldwin put it most vividly when, after viewing the play with Hansberry in a pre-Broadway run in Philadelphia, he commented on it as well as on what happened afterward: And Beneatha’s first-generation college positioning in the play placed her in the company of many young black people in the 1950s whose family hopes rested on their potential educational successes. Domestic workers were familiar to those black viewing audiences, as were chauffeurs. Her family’s struggles to improve its lot in a racist society coincided with similar struggles of segments of the audiences viewing the play. Audiences identified with Mama Lena and her family because they recognized themselves in her or in members of her household. Perhaps that could be modified to read when the black working-class female character received its most realistic portrait.

Carter, for example, lists it “among the finest dramas of this century” and names it “the cornerstone of the black theater movement.” 2 Critics and cultural historians tout the play as the moment in the development of the literature when the black female character received its most realistic portrait. I begin my detailed commentary on literary portraits of strong black female characters with Lorraine Hansberry’s Mama Lena Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) because of the pivotal position that play holds in the development of African American drama.

A raisin in the sun drama