CONTEXT

• Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930, in SouthSide Chicago to an educated, middle class African American family.
• At 8, Hansberry's' family defied segregation laws and moved into a white neighbourhood, leading to a court battle won by her father.
• ARITS was her first play, and it was an immediate major success.

  Winning the NY critics circle award in 1959.
• Hansberry was the youngest and first African American playwright to win.
• Genre = Realist Drama.
• In the 1920s and 30s, the 'Jim Crow' laws in the south prompted many AA;s to relocate to Northern Cities: this movement was known as the Great Migration.
• Whilst the North did not have laws demanding segregation, discrimination persisted through segregated housing, education and employment.
• Written in the 1950s
• Set in Southside Chicago, sometime between 1945 and 1959.
• Hansberry tells the story of a lower-class AA family's struggle to gain middle-class acceptance.
• 1950s: were marked as a time of complacency and conformism
• There were growing racial and domestic tensions in the 1950s.
• The 1950s saw the stereotype of being a land of 'happy housewives and AA's content with their inferior status'. this stereotype therefore caused an uproar of social resentment that would finally find public vote in the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s .
• ARITS explores both vital issues of women and AA's, first performed in the conservative 50s continuing into the radical 60s
• The plays location, Chicago, strictly adhered to segregation.

  Hansberry's family were one of the first AA's to move into a white neighbourhood and H attend a segregated school.