Lorraine Hansberry’s “Raisin In The Sun” debuted on Broadway, March 11, 1959
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I was delighted to see playwright, and activist Lorraine Hansberry getting her props today, during this “Women’s History Month.”
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#BLM OTD 1959 A Raisin in the Sun, the 1st Broadway play produced by a Black woman, Lorraine Hansberry, debuted starring Sidney Poitier & Claudia McNeil. The play,influenced by the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes, is about a struggling Black family in Chicago.
#BlackAmericanHistoryIsAmericanHistory
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— Eric Rosen (@erosen1.bsky.social) March 11, 2025 at 7:55 AM
However I think it is important to note that the subject matter, housing discrimination and segregation is an issue that still exists today.
Stephen Menendian’s piece written for NBC in 2021 went straight to the point:
U.S. neighborhoods are more segregated than a generation ago, perpetuating racial inequity
We often overlook one of the root causes in staggering disparities in health, income and incarceration — where we live.
Racial residential segregation in the United States is the mechanism by which people are sorted into neighborhoods and communities that offer opportunity and deny it. Your residence determines the schools your children are zoned for, the amenities in your neighborhood, the safety of your streets and air and drinking water, your proximity to jobs, the strength of your municipal tax base and local economy and the degree of police surveillance and harassment you may endure.
Although economic segregation has been rising in recent decades, racial residential segregation is higher and stronger. Even affluent and middle-class people of color disproportionately reside in lower-opportunity neighborhoods, while lower-income white people have access to higher-opportunity communities.
Residential segregation was carefully built into our metropolitan areas during the course of the 20th century through collective private action and government policy. And although fair housing laws now prohibit discrimination in housing, segregation persists for a variety of complicated reasons, including differences in wealth and income and local land use policies.
But until now, our understanding of the issue has been incomplete. Using more precise measures of housing segregation that better capture America’s growing diversity rather than exclusively focusing on Black and white populations, new research developed by our team at the University of California at Berkeley shows that racial residential segregation is both more widespread than is generally appreciated and more harmful. To our great surprise, we found that more than 80 percent of major metropolitan areas in the United States were actually more segregated in 2019 than they were in 1990.
Check out this excellent history:
I’m reposting parts of a story I wrote for Black Kos in 2018:
Fighting for Home: The Roots of A Raisin in the Sun
When real estate developer Carl Augustus Hansberry sought to buy a better home for his family in 1938, he settled on a turreted brick structure at 6140 South Rhodes Avenue in the Washington Park area of Chicago. In doing so, he directly confronted one of the most entrenched realities of urban segregation: restrictive covenants. These agreements, signed by the property holders of Chicago’s white neighborhoods, stipulated the exclusion of all black residents with the insulting exception of “janitors, chauffeurs, or house servants.” By 1938, restrictive covenants covered over 85% of the city, crowding its African-American population into dismal, overpriced housing. City leaders at many levels framed such restrictions as a necessary bulwark against racial disharmony. “However unsatisfactory [the covenants] may be,” declared Robert Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, “they are the only means at present available by which the members of the associations can stabilize the conditions under which they desire to live.” Those who defied the covenants, writes Chicago historian Arnold Hirsch, faced not only “mere examples of anti-Black animus,” but an entire system of “sophisticated psychological warfare” intended to keep them caged in the ghettoes.
Ironically, even as the covenants grew stricter, the economic situation worked against them. By 1937, Chicago had 50,000 more African-American residents than apartments where their occupancy was permitted. White property owners capitalized on the great demand, at times extracting exorbitantly high rent from black tenants in violation of the covenants. James T. Burke, the prior owner of the house that Hansberry purchased, was one such landlord. He asserted that he would “put negroes in every block of that property.” In the end, it took only Carl Hansberry’s occupancy to set off an uproar. Predictably, the local property owners association challenged Hansberry’s residency, claiming that “unless an injunction is granted, said neighborhood [would] become mixed, both white and colored with its attendant evils.” But Hansberry fought back, using his own real estate expertise and enlisting the aid of experienced NAACP lawyers. The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that since an earlier case had upheld the legality of the covenant, the issue was res judicata — already adjudicated and not subject to further decisions. On these grounds, it ordered the family to “remove from the premises.” Undaunted, Hansberry appealed, and the case ultimately landed before the United States Supreme Court in October 1940.
While the legal battle raged in Washington, Hansberry’s family was fighting a far more brutal war from their new home. His daughter Lorraine, ten years old at the time, would later describe how her mother, Nannie Louise Hansberry, stayed up nights clutching a pistol to defend her children from the “hellishly hostile” mobs, thrown bricks, and threats of arson that besieged them. After two weeks, the Supreme Court finally reached a verdict, reversing the Illinois decision and securing the Hansberrys’ residency. However, wary of openly addressing the racial roots of the case, the Court abstained from ruling against restrictive covenants in general.
I have always been interested in the events that took place in Chicago at that time. My grandparents knew the Hansberry’s and my grandmother — who was white, and angry about Chicago’s segregation, joined a group of activists — who began to buy houses in all white areas and sell them to black families. She became an “acceptable” buyer. This was not “blockbusting” which realtors used to encourage white flight.
For more on the history of housing segregation, a book I’d suggest you read is Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review).
In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation—that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation—the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments—that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.
Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.
As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.
Adding another good video:
So what is your neighborhood like?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Alabama last weekend marked the 60th anniversary of the clash that became known as Bloody Sunday, the attack that shocked the nation and galvanized support for the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Grio: ‘Bloody Sunday’ 60th anniversary marked in Selma with remembrances and concerns about the future
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Charles Mauldin was near the front of a line of voting rights marchers walking in pairs across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965.
The marchers were protesting white officials’ refusal to allow Black Alabamians to register to vote, as well as the killing days earlier of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a minister and voting rights organizer who was shot by a state trooper in nearby Marion.
At the apex of the span over the Alabama River, they saw what awaited them: a line of state troopers, deputies and men on horseback. After they approached, law enforcement gave a warning to disperse and then unleashed violence.
“Within about a minute or a half, they took their billy clubs, holding it on both ends, began to push us back to back us in, and then they began to beat men, women and children, and tear gas men, women and children, and cattle prod men, women and children viciously,” said Mauldin, who was 17 at the time.
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When I see people planning marches and other actions against Trump and his attack on the U.S. government, I am sympathetic. I endorse their revulsion at the president’s disruptive methods and chaotic goals. But I don’t think it is time to march—yet. Big protest marches without follow-up steps could even be counterproductive at this point, because they might simply drain off energy and tensions without leading to anything.
To deal effectively with a major problem, you have to hunker down and ready yourself for a long-term struggle. This was one of the great lessons learned by Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the Civil Rights Movement. There was little that was spontaneous about their movement, and that was a good thing. Preparation for actions was essential. In the Montgomery bus boycott in the mid-1950s, which essentially was a year-long siege of the white power structure of the city, elaborate efforts were made to secure communications, enlist churches, organize carpools to provide alternative transportation, and raise funds to pay for the gas for the cars being used.
By contrast, when the Civil Rights Movement got pulled into an action in Albany, Georgia, in 1961, it was not prepared, had not studied its adversary, and essentially was defeated.
King and his colleagues studied such setbacks and learned. Before going into Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, they spent months preparing. As he would put it in his letter from that city’s jail that year, “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.”
Those steps may sound airily Gandhian, but they actually were quite practical as they were applied by the Civil Rights Movement.
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Garlin Gilchrist II, the first Black person elected as Michigan’s lieutenant governor, is throwing his hat in the 2026 race for governor, telling theGrio exclusively that he plans to take the state to “the next level.”
“We are at a generational inflection point,” said Gilchrist, a former engineer and tech entrepreneur who left the private sector to be a community organizer and later political aid before he was tapped by Gretchen Whitmer to be her running mate in 2018.
If elected in 2026, Gilchrist would become Michigan’s first Black governor and only the fourth Black person elected as a state executive officer. He would follow in the footsteps of the historically elected former Govs. Douglas Wilder in Virginia (1989), Deval Patrick in Massachusetts (2006) and Wes Moore in Maryland (2022). Gilchrist told theGrio he considers all three historic Black governors as mentors and supporters who have helped model “what it means to be a public servant at the state level, what it means to be a statewide executive, and what it means to be responsive to people.”
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It was the wee hours of carnival on Saturday when the soca legend Machel Montano and Nigerian American Afrobeats superstar Davido took to the stage in Port of Spain. By then, the audience of thousands had already been partying for hours, but when the two launched into their hit song Fling It Up , the crowd erupted.
This year’s Trinidad and Tobago carnival – which included the finals of the country’s steelpan competition and two days of hardcore reveling – highlighted a growing trend of collaboration between artists from Africa and the Caribbean, with musicians exploring the common threads of their cultural heritage at a time when the campaign for reparations has brought about a closer look at historical ties.
Montano, who has dominated soca for decades, said the connection with African artists was an important part of his message. “I’ve been on a journey trying to become spiritually in tune and sing Bob Marley-esque songs. He had songs of freedom. I want to sing songs of hope,” he said.
The video for his latest hit, Pardy, which won the Road March award – given to the song played most often along the carnival parade route – begins with a meeting between Montano and the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, who has been at the forefront of the push for reparations.
Montano, who recently completed an MA in cultural studies, said the prime minister, who in January called for a historic realignment between Africa and the Caribbean, had a “clarity for the Caribbean, clarity for our people, clarity for who we are and where we are going and what we need”.
He added: “We have shared many conversations over the last few years, musically, culturally. We talk about lyrics. We talk about messages. We talk about the vibe of young people. We both love our people and care about what they need and what we can provide to help them reach their highest potential.”
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It’s barely been a week since Meghan Markle’s new lifestyle series, “With Love, Meghan,” premiered on Netflix. In each episode, the Duchess of Sussex shares some of her favorite recipes and hosting tips with her famous friends with a California country house providing a beautiful backdrop.
After holding a steady spot on Netflix’s Top 10 list and leaving viewers desperately searching for where they can buy every pot, knife and apron featured in the show, the streaming service has already committed to giving fans even more content. CNN reported that Netflix just renewed the show for season 2, which is scheduled to start in the fall. But while Martha Stewart, Ina Garten and Nigella Lawson have all made serious dough doing the exact same thing, not everyone is feeling the idea of the Duchess sharing secrets from her soft life with the rest of us.
A January X post from Netflix UK & Ireland announcing the show’s premiere received nearly two million views and plenty of negative comments from those who have no intention of tuning in.
“Ugh! She’s so fake. And hasn’t an original idea in her over inflated mind!” wrote one person in the comments.
“The Sun” took a few shots at the show too. A March 4 TikTok post called the show “cringe,” with lots of commenters co-signing and accusing the Duchess of being “fake” and “narcissistic.”
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