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chapter฀1 Jim Crow Jr. Lorraine Hansberry’s Late Segregation Revisions and Toni Morrison’s Early Post–Civil Rights Ambivalence By the mid-twentieth century, Jim Crow codes, practices, locations, and ideologies were widespread and varied, which meant segregation narratives had to adapt and diversify.Richard Wright tracked Jim Crow’s path not only into the urban north but also across the globe,while Ann Petry,Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, and Frank London Brown chronicled the communities that grew far from the Jim Crow South yet remained deeply marked by it. Some writers sought clean breaks from segregation aesthetics, such as LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka and other writers who would come to be associated with the Black Arts movement, while others sought to revise the Jim Crow script by rewriting conventional white genres with black characters at the center, such as Chester Himes’s detective fiction. Still others enlisted Jim Crow in their versions of the Great American Novel, such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952).The inviolable lines of race segregation were a fiction imposed on the traffic between citizens of varying colors, as Grace Elizabeth Hale demonstrates in her history of Jim Crow culture. As the black-and-white veneer of Jim Crow wore increasingly thin in the 1950s, there was a shift in the strategies,influence,and career trajectories of writers long associated with chronicling segregation. At the same time, there was a rise in younger writers taking on that challenge. With her iconic portrait of segregation and desegregation in A Raisin in the Sun (1959),Lorraine Hansberry emerges at the salt point between segregation and neo–segregation narratives in the wake of civil rights successes. She thus stands as a transitional figure in a tradition that comes of age with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in 1970. In the introduction, I assert that the “neo”in the term “ neo–segregation narrative”marks a fundamental,if elusive, shift in the cultural, legal, and political transition from de jure to de facto segregation. It is worth recalling that the civil rights movement was not a 22 Chapter One finite event but a complex series of struggles, events, victories, and losses, some coordinated and many dispersed.We can identify a discrete movement after the fact and for the convenience of historical narrative, whether a long or short civil rights movement.So,too,the segregation narrative is a slippery and evolving tradition only visible in retrospect.The cases of Hansberry and Morrison capture a snapshot of that all-important but diffuse shift from the segregation to neo–segregation narrative. In a 1951 essay, “How I Told My Child about Race,” Margaret Walker writes, “Living as we do, deep in Dixie, facing every day not merely the question of race but the problems of Jim Crow or segregation, we have a tendency to build an unreal world of fantasy,to draw a charmed circle around us and within this circle to feel safe; to close our eyes to the bitter struggle, and to forget if possible all the ugliness of a world as near as our front door, and closer than the house across the street.”1 Writing three years before Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Walker dismantled the “fantasies” of domestic safety as the ugliness of segregation was at the threshold. Further , as a forebear of the neo–slave narrative, Walker positions Jim Crow’s “unreal world”of stark lines between black and white to show how African Americans experienced slavery’s lasting effects.Hansberry has a remarkably different approach. In the posthumously assembled To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1970), Hansberry writes,“All travelers to my city should ride the elevated trains that race along the back ways of Chicago. The lives you can look into! . . . My people are poor. And they are tired. And they are determined to live.”2 Hansberry does not frame her discussion of racial injustice through the lens of slavery.She also figures domestic space and the streets of Chicago—especially when seen from the rear via public transportation—as sites of realism and triumphant struggle against Jim Crow’s pervasiveness. Between these two discussions of segregation lie the civil rights movement and the transition from compulsory race segregation to uncannily similar de facto conditions. This post–civil rights era also witnessed key generational shifts in racial sensibilities,experiences,and historical markers.The Youngers’ apartment not only provides a space of refuge and strength but also stages Jim Crow’s...

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