Lorraine Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun" was the first play produced on Broadway written by an African-American woman. According to Barbara Tepa Lupac "its commercial success opened the stage doors to other Black writers." (Lupac, 2002, p.1) For that reason alone, the 1959 play would have been a landmark achievement for the author. But the seismic impact of Hansberry's play was not simply the race or the gender of its author, but also in the way African-Americans were portrayed in terms of the scope and nature of their personal and familial aspirations. .

             In "A Raisin in the Sun," the sister of the family, Beneatha Younger aspires to become a doctor. Benethea is not simply a symbol, but a woman who wrestles with her desire to fix the world and also to find herself. Beneatha's brother Walter loves his son and his wife, but rages against the confines of the narrow walls of the apartment where all the Youngers must dwell. Beneatha and Walter seek to move forward professionally in their lives, as a student doctor and a store owner, in an America filled with racial oppression. They also feel a need to reconnect with a lost, African past that they only briefly experience in a wild dance, played on Beneatha's turntable. .

             This fusion of a need to create a new future that intellectually satisfies African-American young people and to understand their ancestry is a theme that still resonates today. The literary critic Phillip Uko Effiong notes"'Raisin' is the first major play by an African American to translate into dramatic form the European exploitation of the lands and peoples of Africa, and the ensuing rebellion against European rule. When 'Raisin' was produced in 1959, African struggles for independence had begun to receive international attention; by the 1960s, African nationalist movements had assumed vast and powerful proportions." (Effiong, p.1) The play took the civil rights movement and wars to liberate colonial Africa and combined the two struggles by showing how African-American aspirations were hemmed in and confined, colonized by White prejudice and White social laws.