Comparing A Raisin In The Sun And Martin Luther King Jr.

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech are two literary works that explore the topic of the lives, struggles, and dreams of African-Americans living in the 1950s-60s. King’s greatly influential speech uses rhetorical strategies to illustrate the harsh reality of what life was like for many African-Americans, while the play A Raisin in the Sun gives a more personal view of their reality by depicting a few weeks of the life of an impoverished black family. Despite the fact that they used different mediums to get their message across, both of these works deliver the same message and explore the same themes of racial injustice, socio-economic inequality, and dreams.
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks about how the typical black person “lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”. The Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun is a perfect example of this. They live in a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago that is full of worn out furniture and barely large enough to house its inhabitants. In a conversation with Walter about their financial situation, Mama Younger says, “Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money”. King said something similar: “One …show more content…
The characters in A Raisin In The Sun dream about getting a higher education, starting a business, and being able to afford a house. Martin Luther King Jr. dreams that “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, that “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood”, and that “one day [America] will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self­evident, that all men are created