by Anita Hill
A Raisin in the Sun illustrates not only how home became a repository for black Americans’ dreams of finding a place in the nation, but also how it symbolizes all Americans’ desire to belong. It is a story of race and gender and a universal experience of believing in a dream. Hansberry’s is a cautionary tale revealing that “a dream deferred” doesn’t just “dry up like a raisin in the sun,” but as Langston Hughes’s poem suggests, instead does “explode.” Moreover, the consequences of deferred dreams are not always immediate, often extending decades into the future, with consequences for generations to come.
For over fifty years, Lorraine Hansberry’s audiences have focused on African Americans’ clashes with the world outside their homes. Her ability to see into the future of conflicts inside the home is just as compelling. Hansberry advises us of the relationship between the problems outside and those conflicts inside. In the years since her play, I have come to fully appreciate how the two work together to enhance or to impede our chances at real equality.
By the 1980s I, like so many people of color and white women, reaped many of the benefits of the advances made during the 1960s and 1970s. But other transformations in society—among them rising materialism, increased violence, resistance to civil rights gains, and a cultural backlash against women—were occurring as well. The suburbs were expanding, and the blueprint of the homes within them grew as well. Inside the home, changes were occurring as more women of all races became part of the paid labor force. The number of law and medical degrees awarded women grew more than tenfold between 1969 and 1979. Women on their own—divorced, single, or widowed—who failed to fit the cultural norm of what “home” and “family” looked like were hit hard. Clashes between the sixties generation of equal rights advocates and their children, who were trending conservative, were escalating and gaining public attention. Though these were all matters Lorraine Hansberry forecast in her play, the ferocity with which they hit by the 1990s caught me by surprise and left many in the black community, in particular, reeling.
Chapter 5. Blame It on the Sun
Home: An environment or haven of shelter, happiness, or love.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
In Southern California, a woman named Marla Wyatt had seen the waves of advancement from the days of her youth in the 1960s, but she also knew that women had not achieved the kind of equality that she thought would be hers four decades later. In the years leading up to the new millennium, the dominant model of women as the caretakers of the home and of men as the breadwinners was beginning to be eclipsed by the reality of women working both inside and outside the home. Feminism, which had ensured opportunities for women’s employment, moved on to address the difficulties of juggling career, household, and motherhood. By the late 1990s, according to clinical psychologist Harriet Kimble Wrye, young feminists were also moving on to concerns of community: the environment and global violence against women, among others. Certainly not all the goals of feminism had been achieved, but new generations identified evolving issues to tackle, and their emphasis often moved away from the home. For some women, like Marla, though they had jobs and lived in houses of their own, neither the problems of home nor the problems of the global community had been completely resolved.
Marla’s struggle to make a home for herself and her children takes place where sunshine, glamour, and the promise of unlimited possibility has long drawn people like moths to a flame. California came to represent the aspirations of so many, and its population doubled from 1960 to 1990. But out of great hope and anticipation often comes great disappointment, even desperation. Nothing could have prepared Marla for the indescribable pain and all-consuming grief she experienced when her youngest son, Sam, was murdered just blocks from her front door. Nevertheless, Marla continues to maintain her sense of belonging in a place where so many of her dreams have been shattered.
A Home of Their Own
They were married in Las Vegas, and Marla, at twenty-four years old, was a young bride for thirty-two-year-old Leonard. But bigger than the age difference was the dissimilarity in their backgrounds. The fresh-faced girl from a midwestern farm had never lived on her own, aside from two years in college; the committed marine from Los Angeles had a failed marriage and two tours of duty in Vietnam behind him. Despite her inexperience, Marla, like most new brides, was sure that she knew what it took to be a wife and mother. Everything about Marla’s upbringing left her little choice: a twenty-four-year-old pregnant woman should marry, preferably the father of her child, and start a family.
It was the 1960s, and the young, handsome couple with a baby on the way looked the part of a traditional family. But Marla was no television sitcom housewife, at least not by the stay-at-home June Cleaver standard. Marla worked as a clerk in a nearby bank. Her husband was not a businessman who came home every night to a family dinner; Leonard was away on duty for much of their young marriage.
Though their lifestyle did not match what was portrayed on popular sitcoms of the day, social messages kept Marla informed about her and Leonard’s responsibilities. In the decades before Marla and Leonard came of age, the Own Your Own Home campaign had promoted home ownership as the American ideal and encouraged men and women to live out their gender roles, and even their patriotism, by buying a home. In shifting responsibility for children’s welfare to mothers and away from government authorities and community organizations, the message of OYOH was that by encouraging their husbands to buy homes, women would be happy and fulfilled, as long as they stayed in those homes and out of the workplace. OYOH slogans declared that the male homeowner was better at just about everything and dubbed him the “real American.”1 And even as the Vietnam War death toll among black men climbed, many still saw military engagement as proof that they were “real Americans.” Thus the combination of Leonard’s military service and home ownership bolstered his patriotic credentials, making his and Marla’s a “real American family.”
In 1969 newlyweds Marla and Leonard found their dream house: a big living room with a fireplace, a separate dining room, and two bedrooms—just enough room for the couple and one child, which was all Marla intended to have. A yellow-and-black tiled bath, a kitchen with a breakfast nook, and a laundry room completed the floor plan. It was much roomier than the apartment Marla had shared with her older sister, and in many ways it resembled Booker T. Washington’s “tasty little cottage.” Set on a street with well-tended lawns, the mission-style stucco house with its spacious porch drew Marla outside to untarnished settings. The big backyard, flanked by a two-car garage, had a brick and stucco fireplace that was perfect for the weekend barbecues Marla loved to hold.
The payments on the $18,500 home were much more than a marine earned. In practical financial terms, that meant Marla’s and Leonard’s salaries were both needed to pay the mortgage. Although a few of her female neighbors stayed home during the day, Marla went to work at the bank every morning. As the years passed, dropping off and picking up her two young children at school and day care became part of her routine, until they were old enough to go home on their own.
Marla and Leonard’s wide street bore a striking resemblance to the era’s coveted suburban ideal, even if racially, Marla and Leonard did not. On weekends, residents emerged from their tile-roofed homes to trim shrubs, groom lawns, water plants, and visit with each other over fences. Each household was as determined as the next to keep up the appearances of their quiet working-class neighborhood. Marla and Leonard’s next-door neighbors were an older white married couple. Nearby, a widowed Latina lived next to a retired wife and husband who were black. A gay couple, white men, lived two doors down, adjacent to a black woman and her children. Marla liked them all. Despite differences in appearance and background, they got along well enough to build a sense of community.
Even after decades of integration, a racially mixed neighborhood in Los Angeles was something of a novelty. By his
torical accounts, housing segregation and discrimination was as much a problem in California as it was in other parts of the country. Minorities had to contend with those who were reluctant to rent or sell to them and mortgage lenders who refused to give them loans. Those factors combined to uphold racist restrictions that negated many African Americans’ dreams of home ownership and relegated most of the rest to specific geographic locations. Rarely did banks grant loans to blacks buying in white neighborhoods, and limited lending in black neighborhoods meant that only a few black buyers had the necessary funds. Wealthy blacks who did not have to rely on the whims of lenders often faced hostility from white sellers and neighbors alike.
Despite their illegality, restrictive covenants, like the one Carl Hansberry challenged in Chicago, had become routinely attached to real estate deeds. In Los Angeles, agreements barring the sale of property to “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race” circumvented the desires and the rights of minorities, as well as white sellers who welcomed buyers of any race. Neighbors who sought to enforce such limitations argued that restrictions prevented sales to “undesirables,” which typically meant that nonwhites were unwelcome.
This type of racist behavior simply reflected age-old prejudices; nothing new or surprising was happening in these neighborhoods. Private developers and state and federal governments all played a role in upholding the racial and class hierarchies that impeded black home ownership. Adam Gordon, writing in the Yale Law Journal in 2005, argues convincingly that regulations created in the New Deal and carried out by the Federal Housing Administration systemically discriminated against African Americans and gave “whites a generation’s head start on accumulating wealth through homeownership.”2 Marla and Leonard’s generation was the first to seek federally insured loans without racial restrictions. Nevertheless, the long-term impact of rules that influenced the racial makeup of neighborhoods in cities and suburbs persisted. Marla’s heterogeneous neighborhood was an anomaly, even at the end of the sixties.
Their Choice of Locations
Chicago and Los Angeles shared a history of racial restrictions in housing, but Los Angeles had its unique geographical genealogy. In 1949, Nat King Cole and his family were greeted by a burning cross on the lawn after they moved into Hancock Park, an affluent white Los Angeles neighborhood whose first families included some of California’s leading industrialists and bankers. The all-too-familiar inferno was attributed to an all-too-familiar source: the Ku Klux Klan, which had been active in California since the 1920s. Although Cole would soon become one of the country’s premier “crossover” singers, appealing to multiracial audiences, he apparently did not have the same appeal to his neighbors. The residents in this community of large and small mansions had enjoyed the “privilege” of racial restrictions for more than one hundred years, and they were not about to give it up without some contention. Hancock Park’s well-heeled and politically powerful residents had the resources to offer to buy out Cole’s attempt to infiltrate their meticulously maintained dominion. When they warned him that they didn’t “want any undesirable people moving into the neighborhood,” Cole agreed, responding, “Neither do I, and if I see anybody undesirable coming in here, I’ll be the first to complain.”3
Unlike poorer blacks, Cole had the personal financial resources that allowed him to purchase the seventy-five-thousand-dollar, fourteen-room Tudor-style home. Ironically, wealth was what put the Hancock Park residents’ racial predilections to the test. Despite the court’s ruling in Shelley, “gentlemen’s agreements” to deny sales to African Americans remained in force, especially in tiny locales. Cole argued that his American citizenship entitled him to take up residence in Hancock Park, saying that “we intend to stay there the same as any other American citizen would.”4 And stay he did.
Nat King Cole’s victory over prejudice became the stuff of legend among blacks in Los Angeles, even those who would never acquire the wealth needed to buy a house like his. Restrictions, however, were not limited to high-end real estate markets. Minutes from Marla and Leonard’s new home was the suburban city of South Gate, which was made up of a number of working-class communities. The area’s open commitment to segregation—born of the southern roots of many of its inhabitants—was notorious. According to historian Andrew Wiese, a local newspaper had once boasted of a community that was “distinctly a white man’s town. . . . A goodly percentage of our people were born south of the Mason and Dixon line . . . [and] one of the controlling factors in their choice of a location was the racial restrictions.”5
Even closer to Marla and Leonard’s community was the working-class, previously racially restricted city of Inglewood, California. White residents began leaving Inglewood when its well-paying aerospace manufacturing jobs dwindled, and minorities began to move in. By the 1960s black and Latino residents were not uncommon in Inglewood, but there and throughout the area, the neighborhoods were largely segregated, with people of color living in the poorer areas.
Many Californians seemed intent on preserving racial segregation and furthering the effects of the earlier federal housing policies. In a state referendum in 1964, voters approved Proposition 14 by a two-million-vote margin, amending the state’s constitution to make it “the right of any person, who is willing or desires to sell, lease, or rent any part or all of his real property, to decline to sell, lease, or rent such property to such person or persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.” Other than the language itself, what made Proposition 14 such a clear rejection of civil rights laws was its timing. Placed on the ballot one year after the enactment of the state’s Rumford Fair Housing Act, Proposition 14 went beyond repealing Rumford, which had aimed to undermine discrimination by prohibiting exactly such racist selling and lending behaviors. Approval of the proposition meant that “gentlemen’s agreements” to restrict residential sales were legal. Proposition 14 also tied the hands of any municipality that might attempt to pass or enforce fair housing laws in the future, protecting instead the privilege to discriminate as a fundamental right.
It would take another federal challenge, in addition to Shelley v. Kraemer, to put an end to the kind of housing discrimination sanctioned by California’s constitution. Three years after Proposition 14 went into effect, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the case of Reitman v. Mulkey that parts of the proposition violated federal constitutional protections. A year later the federal government enacted the Fair Housing Act, Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibits housing discrimination by lenders as well as sellers. But by then California voters had already shown, by a two-to-one margin, that they accepted segregation as readily as the sunshine the state was known for.
Marla and Leonard’s ability to make their home in a racially mixed neighborhood was notable in 1969. The impact of racial restrictions was still being felt decades after the Supreme Court voiced its disapproval of them. Entire neighborhoods had developed around the concept of racial separation and the economic balkanization that went along with it. Just blocks from Marla’s home were the congested streets, corner convenience stores, cramped two-story apartment complexes, and outlets for liquor and cigarettes that characterized the urban environments of the 1960s.
Always Faithful
Home ownership notwithstanding, Leonard never lived up to the ideal of father and husband that the OYOH campaign promised, nor was he the partner and father that Marla and their children, Beth and Marlon, required. For months at a time, Marla experienced what it was like to be a single mother. As she looks back, she realizes that their marriage was never the happy experience she had thought it would be. Marla understood her own responsibilities to the marriage and their home, but she had overestimated Leonard. She had attributed the family’s lack of money to his low pay and had suffered silently the humiliation of having to sell soda bottles to pay for groceries. She had overlooked the inconsistencies in Leonard’s explanations for why he spent so much time away from the f
amily, convincing herself that absences were the price she paid for being a military man’s wife. But all the lies were revealed when she went to pay for the children’s school clothes and discovered that Leonard had been taking money from the family bank account to pay for local hotel rooms. The indignity hit her seemingly all at once—the deceit, the loneliness, the lack of money all boiled down to a feeling of immense betrayal. Semper fidelis, the motto meaning “always faithful,” may have described Leonard’s dedication to his fellow marines; it said nothing about his commitment to his wife or his family.
Marla asked Leonard for a divorce. Ten years after she first walked through the door of the house that she and Leonard bought together, Marla learned what it was truly like to be a single mother. Marla’s guilt over her failed marriage created a determination in her to make sure that her children would not suffer. Even though the OYOH campaign’s promise of marital bliss was unfulfilled in her experience, Marla—knowingly or not—remained dedicated to its child-rearing message: the home, not “the village,” would determine her children’s well-being.
In the 1970s, the divorce rate in the United States doubled. Conceptually, the target audience of the OYOH crusade was dwindling, and the campaign itself was no longer as viable as it had been when Leonard and Marla were children. Marla’s was not the only “happily ever after” story to end in something less. For black women, marriage took a particularly hard hit. From 1970 to 1979, the percentage of African American women who were living with a husband dropped ten full percentage points, compared with a 2 percent drop for white women.
By the time Marla divorced, it was no longer enough for couples to own a home with a yard; parents, whether married or single, were expected to fill those homes with the proper accoutrements to foster their children’s growth. As Marla raised her family in the seventies, she saw the positive message of the home’s role in raising children being eclipsed by consumerism. Commercials for household products, toy promotions, and the ubiquitous marketing of devices, services, and activities (from trendy games to sugared cereals to expensive sneakers) all claimed to help “normalize” her children’s experience and enhance her “family environment.” At the same time, government and noncommercial institutional support for families was on the decline. To make matters worse, the gap between women’s and men’s wages was widening, exceeding what it had been in the 1950s.