[In the following essay, Wilkerson contends that the radical, political message of Hansberry's work was ignored by critics until the 1990s, when a re-assessment of her plays led scholars to recognize the compelling political message of Hansberry's work.]

Lorraine Hansberry was a visionary playwright whose belief in humankind's potential to overcome its own excesses of avarice, oppression, and inhumanity compelled her to raise provocative questions on the American stage. Ironically, her success with A Raisin in the Sun, which won the 1959 New York Drama Critics Circle Award and which won acclaim from white as well as black audiences during its Broadway production, led some critics to view her work as integrationist and accommodationist. A virile, confrontational Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, which challenged its parent, the Civil Rights Movement, following Hansberry's death, seemed to eclipse her work and to label it as “old-fashioned,” both in form and content. However, persistent voices continued to claim for Hansberry a more radical stance, and during the 1990s, they have been joined by some of her earlier detractors. A close examination of two of her plays, A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs, combined with information about her sources and facts about her life affirm a political stance more radical than previously recognized and artistic choices that challenge the boundaries of theatrical realism.

A Raisin in the Sun remains one of the most-produced plays in the United States and one of the most popular with audiences of all colors. A drama filled with humor and pathos, it depicts the conflicts in a working-class black family in Chicago over the use of a ＄10,000 insurance benefit paid on the death of the family's patriarch. The mother Lena, insists on placing a down payment on a house, which happens to be in a white neighborhood, countermanding her son, Walter Lee, who wants to invest in a liquor store. Both characters seem to be pursuing the American dream of upward mobility—property and money—when, in fact, Hansberry is using their aspirations as metaphors for the dream of freedom and the right to be regarded as not only a citizen but as a human being. Because the play uses the family's efforts to move into a white neighborhood as its major metaphor, some black artists of the 1960s considered A Raisin in the Sun an example of a failed and degrading integrationist philosophy.

Amiri Baraka, whose work in the 1960s emerged as the sine qua non of black militant drama, epitomized this attitude as he, along with other black artists, claimed that the play represented a bygone era:

We thought Hansberry's play was part of the “passive resistance” phase of the movement, which was over the minute Malcolm's penetrating eyes and words began to charge through the media with deadly force. We thought her play “middle class” in that its focus seemed to be on “moving into white folks' neighborhoods,” when most blacks were just trying to pay their rent in ghetto shacks.¹

Much of the Black Arts Movement's discomfort with Hansberry lay in the character and interpretation of Lena/Mama, the matriarch of the Younger family. Played by Claudia McNeil in the original stage and film productions, she was seen by audiences, particularly whites, and critics alike, as a familiar figure from the American literary and dramatic canon: the dark-skinned, white-haired, conservative mammy of the “good old days,” who revered the master, sought to emulate his lifestyle, and struggled to keep her unruly children in line. Visually, McNeil fit the stereotype, but her actions belied the concept. Walter Lee's decision not to take the money from the Clybourne Park residents, who want to keep their neighborhood white, was seen often as a capitulation to his mother's will rather than as a personal triumph. Some angry men of the Black Arts Movement took umbrage at Walter Lee, who seemed ineffectual, impotent, and proven wrong by his mother, a reductionist view of their situation, demeaning the black man's struggle for manhood in a racist society. The controversy over whose story it was—Walter's or Mama's—was waged during the play's out-of-town trials in 1958 as Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil vied for central focus. Audiences of that time took greater comfort in the familiar figure of Mama, finding Poitier's restless and explosive Walter Lee more disturbing.

However, in 1986, Baraka, after seeing a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, which restored some material cut from the original production and which eventually became an “American Playhouse” television production, wrote a dramatic reassessment of the play:

[In the 1960s,] we missed the essence of the work—that Hansberry had created a family on the cutting edge of the same class and ideological struggles as existed in the movement itself and among the people. What is most telling about our ignorance is that Hansberry's play still remains overwhelmingly popular and evocative of black and white reality, and the masses of black people dug it true.²

Baraka argues that this play “typifies American society in a way that reflects more accurately the real lives of the black U.S. majority than any work that ever received commercial exposure before it, and few if any since. It has the life that only classics can maintain (20).” Baraka makes this reevaluation of the play without any reference to the passages cut from the original but restored in the Roundabout Theatre production that he witnessed. When he compares the next two explosions in black drama, James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charlie and his own Dutchman, (the first constructs a debate of the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, and Dutchman openly advocates the use of armed resistance), he finds them both wanting because “for one thing, they are both (regardless of their ‘power’) too concerned with white people.”³ In contrast, Baraka notes:

It is Lorraine Hansberry's play which, though it seems “conservative” in form and content to the radical petty bourgeoisie (as opposed to revolutionaries), is the accurate telling and stunning vision of the real struggle. Both Clay [Dutchman] and Richard [Blues …] are rebellious scions of the middle class. The Younger family is part of the black majority, and the concerns I once dismissed as “middle class”—buying a house and moving into “white folks' neighborhoods”—are actually reflective of the essence of black people's striving and the will to defeat segregation, discrimination, and national oppression. There is no such thing as a “white folks' neighborhood” except to racists and to those submitting to racism.⁴

Baraka's concise deconstruction of the term white folks' neighborhood reminds us that the phrase accepts the terms of segregation and discrimination; the more radical view taken by Mama is the right to live where she can afford with no regard to claims of neighborhood “ownership.” Baraka rightfully equates the Younger family with the Fannie Lou Hamers, Malcolm Xs, and Angela Davises, advocates of a radical vision of full participation in society and full acceptance as human beings for the majority, not just the elite class, of blacks. The Youngers are the incarnation of the “ghetto-variety” masses who would burst forth from “the bloody southern backroads and the burning streets of Watts and Newark onto TV screens and the world stage” in the years following the original production of the play.⁵

Walter Lee, a frustrated and restless chauffeur, who desires the opportunities that the “white boys” have, is a precursor to the overtly militant male characters of the 1960s. Hansberry foresaw the explosion to come as the curtailment of the black male's possibilities became unbearable. Hansberry intends Walter to be the protagonist in the play who, according to the principles of Western dramaturgy, undergoes major change and overcomes his human flaws. However, because Walter represents a despised class, which has been ridiculed on the stage, it was difficult for audiences not to impose stereotypes with which they were most familiar. Hansberry recognized that the audience brought into the theater “prior attitudes … from the world outside. “In the minds of many,” she wrote, “Walter remains, despite the play, despite performance, what American [racial] traditions wish him to be: an exotic.”⁶

Hansberry was very aware of the tensions between her creation and the audiences' perceptions. In fact, she also believed that her play was flawed and contained “dramaturgical incompletions”:

Fine plays tend to utilize one big fat character who runs right through the middle of the structure, by action or implication, with whom we rise or fall. A central character as such is certainly lacking from Raisin. I should be delighted to pretend that it was inventiveness, as some suggest for me, but it is, also, craft inadequacy and creative indecision. The result is that neither Walter Lee nor Mama Younger loom large enough to monumentally command the play. I consider it an enormous dramatic fault if no one else does.⁷

When she wrote the screenplay, she attempted to “correct” this flaw by providing greater context for Walter Lee's dilemma in several scenes added to the original stage script. She inserts one particularly telling scene on a Chicago street, which sets Walter's frustration against a global backdrop of freedom struggles. After learning that Mama has used a portion of the insurance money as a down payment on a house, a dejected Walter leaves the apartment. He comes upon a street orator, who is rousing a crowd of black males by comparing their economic deprivation with the rising fortunes of emerging African nations:

Well, my brothers, it is time to ask ourselves what the black man is asking himself everywhere in this world today. … Everywhere on the African continent today the black man is standing up and telling the white man that there is someplace for him to go … back to that small, cold continent where he came from—Europe! …

How long before this mood of black men everywhere else in the world touches us here? How long! How much has to happen before the black man in the United States is going to understand that God helps those who help themselves? …

What is the difference, my friends—between the black man here and every other man in the world? It's what every one of you knows …

We are the only people in the world who are completely disinherited! …

We are the only people in the world who own nothing, who make nothing! I ask you, my friends, where are your factories … ?

… Where are your textile or steel mills? Heh? Where are your mighty houses of finance? … Answer me, my brothers—Where are they?⁸

Freedom is hollow, the orator (and Hansberry) reminds us, without economic power. However, this scene along with most of her additions ended up on the cutting room floor as the producer and director adhered to the presumably safer course, a replication of the successful stage play.

To mainstream critics of the 1950s, Hansberry was a housewife who came out of nowhere to write this compelling play of the 1959 season. Many were surprised by her articulate command of social and political issues. Born into the comforts of the black upper middle class in 1930s Chicago, she hardly seemed destined to cultivate revolutionary attitudes. However, her family home was a cultural mecca where, as a child, she met black artists and leaders, such as Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes. While her father's real estate business gave the family an affluent lifestyle, she came to know the stories and struggles of working-class families through his tenants and the public schools to which he sent her. She admired and envied the independence and defiant attitudes of the latchkey children. The foundation for her political views were laid in her childhood by a combination of influences: the strong black pride taught by her father and mother; the tradition of fighting segregation and discrimination modeled by her father's legal challenge before the Supreme Court of restrictive covenants in housing; and early association with and influence by Ray Hansborough, a black Communist. Hansborough did not school her in the doctrinaire views of the Communist party but rather nurtured in her democratic ideas of freedom and social justice for all people and, especially, African Americans.

Hansberry chose to attend the University of Wisconsin at Madison, a predominantly white university known for its progressive faculty, rather than a black college (as had her parents and siblings), where the social requisites reminded her of the high school sororities and activities of the middle class that she so detested. At Wisconsin, she joined the Communist party and, later, the Labor Youth League. She served as the president of the Young Progressives Association, a campus-based national organization of college students who campaigned for Henry Wallace and the Progressive party in the 1948 election. Under her presidency, the campus chapter of the YPA produced several dramatic productions with political import.

Bored and disappointed with college, Hansberry left after her second year and moved to New York City, with her mother's permission, to pursue “an education of a different kind” in the progressive political and cultural circles of the city. There, she took a course on Africa from W. E. B. DuBois and worked as associate editor with Paul Robeson on his newspaper, Freedom. Robeson devoted the pages of his newspaper to the political upheaval and exploitation of Africa; to Senator Joe McCarthy's campaign against Communists, which was engulfing many writers and artists; and to racial discrimination in the United States. This job brought Hansberry into contact with many international visitors, who came to speak with Robeson, and exposed her to news stories affecting people of African descent all over the world.

It was impossible for a person of Hansberry's consciousness to ignore the momentous social and political events of the 1950s and 1960s. This period marked the beginning of the Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet superpowers, a rising demand by blacks for civil rights at home, and a growing intransigence and rebellion by colonized peoples throughout the world. When Robeson's passport was revoked by the State Department, Hansberry traveled as his representative to an international peace conference in Uruguay and met there delegates from Central and Latin America and Korea, who were resisting the wars being fought on their soil by the U.S. government. She became an articulate spokesperson for these causes and enjoyed something of a celebrity status in progressive circles back home because of her association with Robeson and her experience in Uruguay. Her activities and associations had already earned her an FBI file, but the bureau pursued her in earnest after her trip to the peace conference and her marriage to Robert Nemiroff, known to the FBI for his earlier involvement with Communist party activities.

The general public did not know of these associations. And, although Hansberry did not hide her past, she did not broadcast it either, given the tenor of the 1950s and the red-baiting propensity of some congressmen. But she wrote for several leftist magazines, such as New Challenge and New Foundations, using her own name rather than a pseudonym like some of her contemporaries. And the FBI continued to collect her writings and to record her activities as it was aware of them.

When her play reached Broadway, the bureau was especially anxious to determine whether it was a subversive work so that the agency might anticipate and possibly counteract any influence and effect it might have. The agents who reviewed the play for her FBI file concluded that it “contains no comments of any nature about Communism but deals essentially with negro [sic] aspirations, the problems inherent in their efforts to advance themselves, and varied attempts at arriving at solutions” and that “relatively few [in the audience] appeared to dwell on the propaganda message.”⁹ Hansberry would have been amused by their conclusions. Perhaps because she avoided the catch phrases of the Left and couched her ideas in the folk idiom of African Americans and, perhaps, because certain scenes that give the play a sharper political edge were deleted, the revolutionary import of A Raisin in the Sun eluded the FBI.

Had the agents paid closer attention to the scenes with Asagai, the African intellectual who romances Beneatha, they might have responded differently to the play. A Raisin in the Sun offered important clues to the positions Hansberry would take in Les Blancs, a play that was produced posthumously and that focuses on the inevitability of violent revolution when discourse fails to produce positive action. The mere presence of Asagai as an African intellectual signals the populist thinking of Hansberry. He attends college in the United States but plans to return to make important social and political changes in his native Nigeria, which is still under British colonial rule. Asagai's speeches, as well as Beneatha's brief tutoring of her mother (just before Asagai's first visit to the Younger home) about the need to liberate the African continent from the British and the French, are also intended to educate an audience ignorant of African history and current affairs. Contact with her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, one of this country's earliest scholars of African history and the East Coast advisor and contact for Ethiopian students, had taught Hansberry that the African was much more than the primitive, savage exotic portrayed in American films and novels. Beneatha, modeled on a younger Hansberry, displays the romanticism about Africa seen in earlier writings by blacks, but she also embodies the yearning for a future informed by a sense of identity that proudly encompasses a more accurate knowledge of the African past. Changing her hair style to natural, donning tribal garb, and approximating African dance represent in humorous fashion Beneatha's attempts to embrace her heritage and are evidence of Hansberry poking some good-natured fun at herself and the romantic impulse. But Beneatha is not to be dismissed. For all her foibles and poor judgment in asserting her atheism in her mother's presence, she is a lightning rod for the family's attitudes about Africa, and she prepares the audience for the real revolutionary-in-the-making: Asagai.

Even more telling in A Raisin in the Sun is the advice that Asagai imparts to Beneatha regarding the uneasy progress and personal sacrifice often brought by change and revolution and the connection that he makes between African and African American aspirations. His story about the nature of change, which many critics found distracting and unnecessary (indeed, it was left out of the film), unites Mama's effort to improve the family's lot by buying a house with the struggle by African peoples to be free of colonial rule. At that moment, Asagai becomes the spiritual son of Mama, both inheritor and exponent of the ancestral and human impulse for freedom, and Mama's dream takes on broader implications.

Ideas only hinted at in A Raisin in the Sun emerge full-blown in Les Blancs (1972—first performed posthumously), having grown in Hansberry's consciousness for many years. Because of her contact with her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, she had been exposed to an Africa beyond the Tarzan stories known to most Americans. As a youth, she met young African intellectuals, who would later fight for their countries' independence. She had a lifelong habit of reading avidly everything in African studies available to her, from Basil Davidson's Lost Cities of Africa (1959) to Jomo Kenyatta's study of the Kikuyu, Facing Mt. Kenya (1965). She clipped articles from newspapers on Kenyatta and Kenya's struggle for independence during the early 1960s, the successful guerrilla war for independence waged by the Algerians, Katanga whites resisting the U.N. forces, postcolonial changes in the Congo, the extremes of wealth and poverty in Nigerian cities, the revolt of Angolans against the Portuguese, and U.N. reports on the effects of racial discrimination on economic development in Africa.

Africa of the 1960s was on the verge of revolution. Ghana had emerged in 1957 as the first independent African nation. Kenya was in a prolonged struggle for its liberation and, after decades of seeking land reform and human rights without success under an often brutal British rule, an underground movement had formed, which vowed violent revolution against the whites. The arrest of Jomo Kenyatta, who opposed violence, on charges of plotting to overthrow the British, only exacerbated the situation as violence exploded throughout the country. Hansberry, understanding this history from the perspective of African peoples, spoke at rallies, wrote articles, and sent letters to U.S. editors that criticized the characterization of Africa's independence movements as “Mao Mao” terrorism and that renamed them freedom fighters.

Africa was not that unusual a subject for African American writers. Harold Isaacs, in his study of black American writers and their African ancestry, analyzed the literary relationship of five major writers—Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry—to the continent.¹⁰ However, most looked to Africa as part of a nostalgic or romanticized past or as an escape from the brutalities of racism in the United States. Like her predecessors and contemporaries, Hansberry had fantasized about a romantic African past, having spent hours as a girl daydreaming about her origins. The late Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry's former husband and literary executor, noted in an essay on Les Blancs that, as she wrote in her unfinished, semiautobiographical novel, she believed:

in her emotions she was sprung from the Southern Zulu and the Central Pygmy, the Eastern Watusi and the treacherous slave-trading Western Ashanti themselves. She was Kikuyu and Masai, ancient cousins of hers had made the exquisite forged sculpture at Benin, while surely even more ancient relatives sat upon the throne at Abu Simbel watching over the Nile.¹¹

Hansberry, who at the time of Isaacs's study had not yet written Les Blancs, also believed that African Americans might gain inspiration for their freedom fight from their African ancestors and that the future of the peoples and their continents are linked.

Set in an African country in the midst of rebellion and resistance against colonial rule, Les Blancs is an uncompromising drama that reveals the terrifying consequences of the failure of meaningful dialogue. Hansberry exposes her audience to the tragic choices that lead to armed resistance and violent revolution: exploitation and oppression perpetrated by greed and supremacist beliefs and fed by the crippling actions of patriarchal liberals and the complicity of organized religion. While the play charts the inevitability of violence when dialogue is used only to postpone, it does not shirk from nor romanticize the price of resistance—no matter how justified.

To speak or write about exploitation and oppression in Africa during the 1960s, when Hansberry began this play, was to court controversy and the wrath of many critics. However, as a student of African history and politics and as an advocate for African independence from colonial rule, she saw the tragic scenario unfolding: Western excuses for the continuation of colonial oppression, mounting pressure by the resistance, and the inevitable bloodshed that would happen if the people's will was thwarted. “Radical” may be an appropriate label for her views when cast against the prevailing ideas acted out by the governments of the West, but “humane” seems equally reasonable when one rejects notions of the inferiority of Africans. To continue the virtual enslavement of these people was unconscionable to Hansberry.

The central character of the play is Tshembe Matoseh, who has returned home for his father's funeral and finds the Africans in violent, though not yet open, rebellion against the colonists. Not unlike the Mao Mao movement in the 1960s, the people of Tshembe's tribe are waging silent, deadly warfare against the settlers, killing families in the dead of night. The Africans have come to this point only after many years of thwarted efforts to gain human and civil rights through peaceful means. Upon his arrival, Tshembe is immediately confronted with the expectation of his tribal associates to join the resistance. He, however, has grown cynical and weary of the movement and prefers to quickly dispense with his familial duties and return to his English wife and son in London. But Tshembe is swept up by his own emotions, by the revelation that his father was a leader in the resistance, and by an intensifying series of events, which propel him to the wrenching decision to join and help to lead the growing revolution.

Several characters represent the face of oppression. One of the most compelling, the Reverend Torvald Neilsen, never appears on stage, but his presence is felt as the founder of the mission where much of the play takes place. Hansberry modeled this character on Albert Schweitzer, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952 for his work as a medical missionary in the Gabon territory of West Africa. Greatly admired for bringing “civilization” to “the dark continent” and establishing a hospital in the jungles of Lambarene, Schweitzer was also a Renaissance man—holder of doctoral degrees in theology, philosophy, and medicine; author of a number of important religious texts; and principal of Strasbourg Theological College before the age of thirty. During his lifetime, he was recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on organ architecture, as an eminent Bach scholar, and as a celebrated interpreter of Bach's organ music.

Having studied John Gunther's Inside Africa and various articles on Schweitzer, Hansberry was also aware that his attitudes toward the Africans he had chosen to help was typical of the West: highly paternal. Gunther, who describes his visit to Lambarene, carefully balances Schweitzer's reverence for life and personal sacrifice (living in an African jungle) against his authoritarianism and colonialist attitudes toward Africans. In a chapter on that visit, he captures in Schweitzer's words his beliefs about the African:

The Negro is a child, and with children nothing can be done without the use of authority. We must, therefore, so arrange the circumstances of daily life that my natural authority can find expression. With regard to the Negroes, then, I have coined the formula: “I am your brother, it is true, but your elder brother.”¹²

According to Gunther, Schweitzer loved the Africans only in the abstract. “He seems to be fonder of the animals in Lambarene than the human beings.”¹³ Hansberry's use of Schweitzer as the source for the Reverend Neilsen allowed her to unmask the seemingly benevolent and benign face of colonialism and to reveal its despotic and cruel visage. The choice was risky, given the veneration accorded Schweitzer in many parts of the Western world.

Much of Hansberry's portrayal of the mission is based on Gunther's account. Gunther reported, “No bush hospital can be tidy, any more than can a farmyard in South Carolina. There will always be things out of place, and innocent litter on the ground. But Schweitzer's hospital was, I thought, the most unkempt place of its kind I saw in all Africa.”¹⁴ In the play, Charlie Morris, a white journalist who has just arrived at the mission in order to write an article praising Neilsen, reveres the doctor and his work. When Morris justifies the unsanitary, primitive condition of the hospital with the argument he has heard—that Africans would not come for treatment if it were different—Willy DeKoven, one of the doctors who works at the mission hospital, wryly comments: “One of the first things that the new African nations have done is to set up modern hospitals when they can. The Africans go to them so freely that they are severely overcrowded.”¹⁵

Schweitzer's recorded attitudes support Hansberry's depiction of the paternalistic, though seemingly benign oppression. In the play, Neilsen dismisses the tribal leaders as children when they bring a petition for a new constitution that would permit Africans to sit in the legislature in proportion to their numbers. “Dear children,” he smiles and says, “Go home to your huts before you make me angry. Independence indeed!”¹⁶ The brutal consequences of this attitude are played out through the character of Major Rice, a cruel settler who commands the local police force and who raped Tshembe's mother. The child of that assault, Eric, has become an alienated, lonely young man seeking love through a homosexual relationship. Through Charlie Morris, the American journalist who constantly reveals his ignorance of African affairs, Hansberry captures the naivete of the supposedly well informed American. Morris does not realize at first the complicity of his country in colonialism (it is U.S. or U.S.-made bombers and weaponry that defend the forces of oppression from the resistance at the end of the play). When military troops are housed at the mission at the insistence of the overtly racist Major Rice, the benevolent, violent, and naive faces of the oppressors become one. Madame Neilsen, wife of the reverend, stands in stark contrast to these multiple expressions of oppression. Physically blind, she foresees nevertheless the impending conflagration and, as Tshembe's surrogate mother and teacher, urges him to become a warrior for his people.

Hansberry reserved some of her most piercing criticism for established religion and its complicity with the forces of repression. As a child in Chicago, Hansberry had seen photographs of the pope blessing Mussolini's troops as they set forth to attack Abyssinia. The military action was much criticized at the family dinner table and among blacks in her home town. In the play, when Tshembe discovers that Abioseh, his brother, is a novice in the Catholic church and soon to be a priest, he excoriates him and the role of the church in the colonization of Africans, calling Christianity only “another cult—which has kept the watchfires of our oppressors for three centuries!”¹⁷ The betrayal of the church is enacted in the play through Abioseh, who turns informer and exposes Peter/Ntali, a leader of the resistance, who is then shot on the spot.

Undoubtedly, one of the most radical aspects of this play is the position that it takes on violent revolution. Some critics called it “propaganda” while others asserted that it “advocated genocide of non-blacks as a solution to the race problem.”¹⁸ It would have been quite easy to reduce the issue of revolution to a black-white issue, but Hansberry saw deeper. And she attempted and achieved something much more difficult in Les Blancs: to chart the agonizing journey that brings a people to the point of violent rebellion. Hansberry remembered that the turning point in the South African struggle came with the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, an action that she protested along with many others at the United Nations. In the play, there is no joy in Tshembe when he finally takes up arms against the colonialists. He has killed his brother, who betrayed their people, and the first shots fired at the mission have taken the life of his surrogate mother, Madame Neilsen. The hyena-like howl that pours forth from Tshembe as he holds her limp body in his arms is a cry of pure agony at the tragedy of human waste that has and is about to occur. Among the innocent and guilty are black and white; both will die in this struggle. The Africans in this story have chosen armed rebellion reluctantly and slowly. Ironically, the actions of Abioseh echo the warning from Asagai in A Raisin in the Sun (as well as that of Hansberry) that African “winners” in the end will not guarantee peace and freedom, but the struggle for independence and democratic freedoms for the masses is likely to continue even as petty toadies of empire take over. The ideas in Les Blancs are a far cry from the simplistic interpretations claimed by some of its early critics.

Artistically, Hansberry faced the challenge of depicting the visceral nature of Tshembe's choice, which goes beyond logic and rationality, while communicating the often subtle and indirect role that women play in freedom struggles. A woman whose feminism was sharpened and supported by her reading of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1947, French; 1953, English), Hansberry was well aware of the cultural constraints placed on the depiction of women and sought various ways to overcome these limitations in her dramaturgy. She used a clever strategy to communicate the compelling nature of Tshembe's final choice and to incorporate the powerful, though often hidden, influence of women in political affairs, while presenting these matters to a Western audience for whom women's roles (and black women, in particular) were primarily servile.

Typically, Hansberry looked to the classics—specifically, Shakespeare—for a form grand enough to encompass the monumental questions raised in this play and to give her characters and their dilemmas heroic stature. But the classical model was built on male protagonists or individuals of great wealth or power, whose actions affected the state or the lives of many people. Hansberry's desire to use this form for the ordinary human being posed structural problems for her writing with which she would struggle throughout her life. In her early drafts, for example, she had two major characters, Candace and Tshembe, returning home to their father's funeral. The two became one male character, Tshembe, prompting some writers to question whether Hansberry censored her feminist self or was unduly influenced by her husband, Robert Nemiroff. The answer, however, may lie more with the limitations of the form than with her sensibilities.

In fact, Hansberry used a very innovative device to overcome these restrictions in Les Blancs: the African woman warrior. This woman, who appears as a warrior-dancer, is the only woman of African descent in the play (not counting villagers, who may be added in the background). She can be seen only by Tshembe and appears to him twice, carrying a spear and eventually thrusting it into his hand. She represents the collective history of African people and depicts through movement their slaughter and enslavement.¹⁹ She never speaks words, but her gestures communicate volumes. She has appeared to Tshembe before; wherever he goes, he cannot escape her: the streets of London, the subways of New York. A possessed Tshembe confesses, “And whenever I cursed her or sought to throw her off … I ended up that same night in her arms!”²⁰ Her power over him is hypnotic and passionate.

When Charlie questions why Tshembe is behaving so strangely (since he cannot see the warrior-dancer), Tshembe cries out, “Who! Who! When you knew her you called her Joan of Arc! Queen Esther! La Passionara!”²¹ With this last name, Hansberry references the Spanish Civil War and Dolores Ibarruri, known as La Passionara, whose words not only galvanized the imagination of the republican resistance but who epitomized the spirit of women throughout Spain. In his book on the Spanish Civil War, Richard Kisch describes her:

She was then a tall dark woman with large eyes set deep under heavy black eyebrows. She radiated a burning intensity which was reflected in her gift of language. … La Passionara, like other mass leaders who were making a name for themselves as natural soldiers … knew how to seize the moment of action when it came.²²

Unlike La Passionara, Hansberry's woman warrior does not speak, but she draws on an aesthetic more common to African performance in which the gesture has equal if not greater meaning than the word. In that sense, the female figure exhibits more strength than Tshembe, the major character, in that she has power over him. It may seem like a risky strategy in a play so filled with eloquent language and rhetoric, but the dancer's “silence” actually emphasizes the emptiness of words.

Tshembe and Charlie, two men representing the East and the West, the developing and the developed country, have talked and talked and talked, sparring often, showing respect for each other at times. But just as the talks on the governmental level prove fruitless, so does the conversation between Tshembe and Charlie as the revolution overtakes them all. Words do not resolve the situation. Finally, action speaks—not in words but in violent, revolutionary events. Had Hansberry retained Candace as a major, realistic character, she would have been bound by words and the limitations of her place as a woman. Had she rebelled against her place and assumed a leadership role, her unusual position (at least in Western eyes) might have distracted ultimately from the focus of the play. When the silent dancer is pitched against the backdrop of Hansberry's command of the word, the intentionality and innovativeness of this figure becomes quite clear.

It is tempting to discuss this character primarily in the context of the limited roles of women of the 1950s and the genius of creating in a woman power that encompasses intellect, artistry, and emotion. While that argument is useful in understanding perhaps why Hansberry uses only one woman of African descent, it may obscure the real genius of this choice. In an important sense, the dancer is more than woman—she embodies the spirit of a great continent, of a people, and is both man and woman. In the play, she also embodies the spirit of Tshembe's father, who was a leader in the resistance. Visually, she exhibits the movement and voluptuousness attributed to women while, at the same time, she carries a spear and calls Tshembe to the warrior role most associated with men. The dancer-warrior, like all of Hansberry's characters in this remarkable play, is multilayered and complex. It is also worth noting that the dancer pushes the boundaries of realism but is credible within the play's context because she can be seen as an extension of Tshembe's consciousness.

Eric, Tshembe's younger brother, represents another facet of Hansberry's radical views. Hansberry, who was a lesbian, believed that homosexuals may comprise the last oppressed minority. She condemned homophobia both in essays and letters. Eric is in a homosexual relationship with Dr. Willy DeKoven. When Tshembe angrily asks if Eric is “his playtime little white hunter,” a lonely Eric responds that DeKoven listens to him, cares for him, spends time with him, while his brothers have been away. Eric is the product of Major Rice's rape of his mother, so he was unable to seek solace with his brothers' father. Alienated from the familial relationships that have brought Tshembe back, Eric is adrift—and his homosexuality alienates him even more from the others at the mission.

When armed warfare breaks out, however, Eric is the first of his brothers to join the native rebellion, and he takes a prominent role in the fight. While Eric is not the focal point of the play, his inclusion in the freedom struggle is a small footnote that reinforces Hansberry's progressive views.

The popularity and success of recent productions of Les Blancs in Oregon and Baltimore, along with anniversary productions of A Raisin in the Sun in both university and professional theaters confirm the compelling nature of the plays and Hansberry's ideas. Several decades after her death, the human issues of freedom, equality, and independence; their relevance to ethnicity, color, gender, class, sexuality, and sexual orientation; and the artistic tools used to represent these issues in provocative and persuasive forms remain challenges for the field of theater. Hansberry believed in the social and political import of art, and she demonstrated her commitment to this principle by crossing sacrosanct boundaries and taking intellectual and artistic risks.

Notes

1. Amiri Baraka, “A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Sun's Enduring Passion,” in Lorraine Hansberry, “A Raisin in the Sun” and “The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window” (New York: Vintage, 1995), 19.

2. Baraka 19.

3. Baraka 19.

4. Baraka 19-20.

5. Baraka 20.

6. Lorraine Hansberry, “Willy Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live,” Village Voice (12 Aug. 1959): 7.

7. Hansberry, “Willy Loman,” 7.

8. Lorraine Hansberry, “A Raisin in the Sun”: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay (New York: Plume, 1992), 132-134.

9. Lorraine Hansberry File, 100-44090-8 (Philadelphia: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Feb. 5, 1959), 1.

10. Harold R. Isaacs, “Five Writers and Their African Ancestors,” in Part I, Phylon 21.3 (1960): 243-265; Part II, Phylon 21.4 (1960): 317-336.

11. Robert Nemiroff, “A Critical Background,” in Lorraine Hansberry, “Les Blancs”: The Collected Last Plays (New York: Vintage, 1994), 27.

12. John Gunther, Inside Africa (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), 733.

13. Gunther 714.

14. Gunther 714.

15. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 113.

16. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 115.

17. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 61-62.

18. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 133-134.

19. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 81.

20. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 80.

21. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 81.

22. Richard Kisch, They Shall Not Pass (London: Wayland, 1974), 103-104.