One of the things I enjoy about watching old movies is seeing how far our world has advanced since the time of the movie’s release. Last night, while scrolling through the channel guide, I ran across a perfect example of this. The film was “A Raisin In The Sun”. This was a 1961 release based on a play of the same name by Lorraine Hansberry. Hansberry wrote both the stage play and the screenplay. If you have never seen this movie, I strongly encourage you to watch it with your friends and family. It is truly a transformative experience. The film featured such luminaries as Sydney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ivan Dixon, and John Fiedler (the only white character in the cast) in the story of a poor black family from Chicago who comes into a large sum of money from an insurance policy after the passing of the family patriarch. Daniel Petrie directs the cast through their struggles and disputes as to how to best put to use the sizable fortune of $10,000. In the vacuum created by their patriarch’s passing, a power struggle develops between the mother, Lena Younger and her son, Walter Lee Younger, played by Poitier, over what to do with this once-in-a-lifetime chance to buy a piece of the American Dream.
Mama Younger takes it upon herself to use some of the money as a down payment to buy a house in a nearby community where her family can thrive in more prosperous surroundings than the shabby environs of the South side of Chicago. Before they can even move into the new place, the family is visited by Mark Lindner, a soft-spoken representative of the “community improvement” committee from the new neighborhood. Lindner diplomatically offers the Youngers more money to the family than they paid for the house if they would agree not to move into the neighborhood in order to preserve its ethnic integrity. In Mama’s absence, the family members send Lindner on his way with a firm refusal of his benevolent-sounding offer. After enduring some disagreements and hardships with the balance of the money, including Walter Lee losing several thousand dollars to a shady business associate, Walter Lee calls Lindner back in a desperate attempt to re-capture some of their funds. The most powerful scene in the film is where Lindner arrives with the paperwork in hand to overturn the transaction. Rather than trying to threaten or intimidate the Younger family, Lindner offers them a charming and idyllic description of a community wherein honest people have worked hard to build a nice place to live. The Youngers seem enthralled by the idea since that is what they want, as well. Things turn ugly, though, when Lindner says that it is important that all of the residents must be of a “common background”. The family, including Walter Lee, understands the meaning of that message and promptly throws Lindner out, choosing to preserve their dignity and their pursuit of the American Dream.
While it may be true that many laws have been passed in the past 60 years since this movie came out, and some progress has been made, many of the sentiments and practices are still common today. The passage of six decades has certainly not produced sixty years of progress in racial equity. Americans have made great strides in technology in the years since this film was released, which was four months before Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital flight into space on May 5th of that year. We have seen great changes in so many areas of life except in the most important one: how we treat each other. The noble-sounding code words used by Lindner can be heard today in discussions on things such as voting rights and election integrity. The insidious and pervasive effects of racism still are spreading rot throughout our society in a way that technology cannot conceal.
It is definitely not lost on me that I could watch this movie on a television that gets a hundreds of channels and allows me to rewind, record, fast forward, slow-mo, and pause the action with my fingertips. I am also aware that we have gone from Alan Shepard’s first flight as the tip of the government’s spear of NASA to this week’s news of a trio of ultra-billionaires whipping it out to be the first private citizens to conquer the Final Frontier of space. The amount of knowledge gained is enormous, yet the amount of wisdom gained seems non-existent.
We have, it seems, made great advances over the last sixty years in everything except our humanity. It saddens me greatly to think we may well go another sixty years and still be further behind on this issue than we were back in 1961. I don’t know if we can survive that.
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