Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division

“Somewhat Like War”

113 “Somewhat Like War” “Somewhat Like War” The Aesthetics of Segregation, Black Liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun MICHELLE Y. GORDON We must come out of the ghettoes of America, because the ghettoes are killing us, not only our dreams, as Mama says, but our very bodies. It is not an abstraction that the average American Negro has a life expectancy of five to ten years less than the average white. You see, Miss Oehler, that is murder, and a Negro writer cannot be expected to share the placid view of the situation that might be the case with the white writer. As for changing “the hearts of individuals”—I am glad that the American nation did not wait for the hearts of individual slave owners to abolish the slave system—for I suspect that I should still be running around on a plantation as a slave. And that really would not do. Sincerely, Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black1 In early summer 1937, a mob arrived at 6140 Rhodes Avenue to convince the Hansberrys of Chicago to abandon their new home. Instead, the Hansberrys convinced their new white neighbors to disperse, with a shotgun. As expected, the neighborhood “improvement association” sought an injunction against the Hansberrys, on the grounds that blacks legally could not occupy any residence in any neighborhood covered by a “race-restrictive covenant.” In their attempt to combat legal segregation in the North, and to open up desperately needed housing around Chicago’s Black Belt, the Hansberrys and local NAACP attorneys took their case before the U.S. Supreme Court. Lorraine Hansberry later recalled her “desperate and courageous mother, patrolling [the] house all night with a loaded German luger, doggedly guarding her four children, while [her] father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court” (Young 113 114 Representing Segregation 20). In its 1940 decision on Hansberry v. Lee, the Supreme Court ruled in Carl Hansberry’s favor on a technicality, while declining to address the constitutionality of the covenants themselves. It would not be until 1948, in Shelley v. Kraemer, that the North’s legal bulwark of racial segregation—the race-restrictive covenant—was declared unconstitutional.2 Coming of age amid the tensions and violence surrounding Chicago’s “series of Mason-Dixon lines” fundamentally shaped Lorraine Hansberry’s selfconsciousness , radical politics, and revolutionary art. As a young playwright, Hansberry shaped her aesthetic practices to respond directly to the urban segregation her family had fought for so long, and, in the midst of the cold war, the capitalist systems from which segregation grew. Her first play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), directly engages segregation struggles in Chicago, as a penultimate symbol of black oppression and resistance. In doing so, she brought local, individual struggles of African Americans—against segregation, ghettoization, and capitalist exploitation—to the national stage. “Our Southside,” she once wrote, “is a place apart. Each piece of our living is a protest” (Young 17). Set in that South Side “sometime between World War II and the present” (Raisin 22), Raisin unfolds in a two-bedroom apartment in an overcrowded black ghetto whose borders had shifted little since Hansberry v. Lee.3 In Raisin, Hansberry offers an “aesthetics of segregation” to generate public testimony about urban black life, to represent her radically expansive notion of the real, and to provide a prophetic framework for anti-racist, anti-colonialist movements gaining force in America and the world. Within the competing realities of black and white life, she dramatizes Chicago’s white supremacist social order, and exposes its connections to the Jim Crow South, capitalist enterprise, and colonialism. Acutely aware of the social organization and violence at the center of Chicago’s near-absolute segregation, Hansberry stages a revolutionary intervention into the cyclical systems of ghettoization, proffering Raisin as a dramatic prelude and challenge to the racialized rituals of ghettoization, desegregation, and organized white resistance. Raisin’s forthright engagement with Chicago segregation at the grass roots exposes and denaturalizes the workings of mid-century urban segregation and massive white resistance to black self-determination. Like other influential black urban writers—including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and Langston Hughes—Hansberry deploys her aesthetics of segregation to uncover “not only the results of [segregation], but also the true and inescapable cause of it—which of course is the present organization of American society” (“Scars” 55). Anticipating the limits of traditional freedom-movement emphasis on legal segregation, desegregation...