This article examines Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun by exploring the conflict between a traditionally Southern, Afro-Christian, communitarian worldview and certain more destabilizing elements of the worldview of modernity. In addition to examining the socio-economic problems confronted by some African Americans in the play, this article investigates the worldviews by which these Black people frame their problems as well as the dynamics within the relationships of a Black family that lives at the intersection of racial, class, and gender inequality in Chicago during the latter 1950s.

The effect of race in the U.S. labor market has long been controversial. One posits that racial effects have been diminished since the civil rights movement of the 1960s (Alba & Nee, 2003; Sakamoto, Wu, & Tzeng, 2000; Wilson, 1980). Even if some disparities in labor-market outcomes among race groups are found, advocates of this “declining significance of race” thesis do not attribute these disparities to racial discrimination. They, instead, understand the racial gaps as a result of class composition of racial minority groups, classes represented by larger proportions of the working-class population (Wilson, 1980, 1997) as well as unskilled-immigrant workers (Borjas, 1994).

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).