My Evolving Views on Race , Part III

My first year of teaching was at McCluer High School teaching Sophomore English and first year German.  The theme for Sophomore English was "Confinement" and we kicked off the year with "Raisin in the Sun".  As an English major at Southeast Missouri State College, I had primarily taken classes in language, Greek and British literature with only the required classes in American Literature.  Suddenly I'm teaching "Raisin in the Sun".  It was wonderful---I loved the language and the symbolism of the play, but it was the raw emotion that gripped me like a band around my heart.

The family was struggling with this new life of "freedom" and opportunity, wanting to buy a home.  But a generational divide within the family is one of the main themes.  "

Mama: Oh—So now it’s life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money. I guess the world really do change . . .
Walter: No—it was always money, Mama. We just didn’t know about it.
Mama: No . . . something has changed. You something new, boy. In my time we was worried about not being lynched . . . You ain’t satisfied or proud of nothing we done. I mean that you had a home; that we kept you out of trouble till you was grown; that you don’t have to ride to work on the back of nobody’s streetcar—You my children—but how different we done become.

MAMA …Big Walter used to say, he’d get right wet in the eyes sometimes, lean his head back with the water standing in his eyes and say, “Seem like God didn’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams – but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worth while. (Act I, scene i)

And of course, this lead me to Langston Hughes and his wonderful poetry, one of which was the basis of the title of "Raisin in the Sun".

Harlem

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

I was hooked.  From Langston Hughes, I moved on to James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen:  the Harlem Renaissance Poets.

Teaching in the late 1960's, I also worked under the influence of the protest songs of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin.  I taught that also as poetry and moved on to spirituals to show my students that protest music was nothing new.

In addition to teaching, I started thinking about graduate school.  I really wanted to study Black Literature, but I looked in the mirror and realized that was not in my future.  Even some of my Black students questioned my love of "their" literature.  What did I know of "dreams deferred"?  What did I know about the Black experience?

So, I dutifully signed up for classes in Shakespeare, Romantic Poets and Eugene O'Neill.  But, I was never happy and eventually stopped working on that graduate degree.