URBAN REALISM
Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and other notable writers sought to create pieces that were even more socially and politically engaged than literature produced in earlier periods.
These works exhibited to true-to-life representations of African American experiences and was to an extent a continuation of what some writers of the Harlem Renaissance represented in their work. This next wave of writers examined the severe impact of social power structures upon the individuals who strived to overcome an oppressive system. Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy (1945) gives firsthand accounts to such circumstances, as do shorter pieces such as “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” (1961).
Wright’s protégé, Ralph Ellison offers additional examples of systematic oppression through his novel Invisible Man where the unnamed protagonist embarks on an eschatological journey. Readers bear witness to situational conflicts that result in psychological ramifications for the individual and by extension—segments of society.
In this time, there was also is a strong relationship between form and content, and it was quite noticeable in the poetry of Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. Margaret Walker’s “For My People” (1942) paid tribute to African Americans as a resilient determined people. In A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Brooks made use vernacular English by blending it with modernist elements.
Throughout this anthology are several representations of the history of Black theater and performance from the nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the developments that took place in the theater world and in society. Early Black playwrights such as William Wells Brown and Angelina Weld Grimké used the theater as an apparatus for social change. It has been an ongoing effort to put issues that needed fixing on display. In 1935, in spite of the struggles that the nation and the world endured in the midst of the Great Depression, the Federal Theater Project was formed. It was amongst a number of programs funded by the New Deal. Five years later, the American Negro Theater was formed, and many of the performances were held in Harlem. New York City, as well as Chicago continued to be settings for depictions of Black urban life.
When it premiered on Broadway in 1959, audiences saw how the experiences of Younger family in Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” dramatized the unfair treatment that hers and other Black families faced as a result of restrictive housing covenants in Chicago. When the Hansberrys moved into the predominantly white area of Washington Park, they were on the receiving end of discrimination and violence. Her father’s legal battle, resulted in the court ruling, Hansberry v. Lee (1940), which found that while the Washington Park covenant was illegal because of a technicality, it was not unconstitutional. The Youngers, who struggled to survive in a housing tenement, wanted a better life in the fictitious Clybourne Park area.
The conversation about Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” is continued in the Key Topics in African American Literature podcast. The panelists also discuss how contemporary writers and performers of the stage and screen can effectively raise awareness about past and current social issues.