Clybourne Park - American Conservatory Theater

A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
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PRESENTS
Clybourne Park
by bruce norris
directed by jonathan moscone
american conservatory theater
january 20–february 13, 2011
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
dan rubin
publications & literary associate
michael paller
resident dramaturg
beatrice basso
production dramaturg
emily hoffman
publications fellow
zachary moull
dramaturgy fellow
WORDS ON PLAYS
made possible by
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Bungalow Belt, South Side of Chicago, IL, by Ed Boik (2002).
table of contents
1.
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of Clybourne Park
3.
The Freedom to Provoke: An Interview with Playwright Bruce Norris
by Beatrice Basso
13.
Aging 50 Years in 15 Minutes: An Interview with Scenic Designer Ralph Funicello
by Emily Hoffman
18. To Signify or Not to Signify: Costume Designer Katherine Roth on Clybourne Park
20. What Is Gentrification?
by Dan Rubin
27. Race and the City: Gentrification in Chicago and San Francisco
by Dan Rubin
35. City of Neighborhoods: A History of Racial Division in Chicago
by Zachary Moull
41. The Way to 406 Clybourne Street: The Connections between Clybourne Park
and A Raisin in the Sun
by Dan Rubin
44. Art for Society’s Sake: The Legacy of Lorraine Hansberry and A Raisin in the Sun
by Dan Rubin
50. Can We Laugh Yet? A Brief History of Race and Comedy in America
by Emily Hoffman
56. What’s in a Name? From “African” to “African American” and the Steps
In Between
by Beatrice Basso
59. Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .
ON THE COVER GentrificationBY0IERRE,A3COTT
Preliminary wall elevations for Clybourne Park by scenic designer Ralph Funicello
characters, cast, and synopsis of
CLYBOURNE PARK
Clybourne Park premiered at Playwrights Horizons in New York in February 2010.
Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company produced it in Washington, d.c., in March 2010.
The British premiere opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in September.
a.c.t.’s production is the West Coast premiere.
characters and cast
act i (1959)
russ
bev, married to Russ
francine
jim
albert, married to Francine
karl lindner
betsy, married to Karl
act ii (2009)
dan
kathy
lena
tom/kenneth
kevin, married to Lena
steve
lindsey, married to Steve
Anthony Fusco
René Augesen
Omozé Idehenre
Manoel Felciano
Gregory Wallace
Richard Thieriot
Emily Kitchens
setting
A three-bedroom home in the near northwest of central Chicago.
synopsis
ct i. September 1959. Russ Stoller sits reading while his wife, Bev, and their African
American housemaid, Francine, pack some final items: in two days, Russ and Bev
are moving to Glen Meadow (a suburb outside of the city), and in a week Russ will begin
work at his new office. Since the death of their son, Kenneth, a Korean War veteran, two
and a half years ago, the home (and the neighborhood as a whole) has been a source of
pain for the couple. Bev hopes the move will be a fresh start. Jim, Bev’s minister, arrives to
counsel Russ, whose anger and nihilism are worrying his wife. Russ, however, is uncomfortable discussing his private feelings about the loss of his son, and he tells the cleric to
leave him alone. Before Jim can leave, Albert, Francine’s husband, arrives to collect her. He
volunteers to help her bring a trunk containing Kenneth’s belongings downstairs.
Karl Lindner, a representative of the neighborhood community association, arrives with
his wife, Betsy, who is eight months pregnant and deaf. He has come to express his concern that the Stollers have sold their house to an African American couple. Because the
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transaction was handled by a realtor, Russ and Bev were unaware that the purchasers were
not white. A heated discussion ensues.
Jim brings Francine into the conversation, asking her whether or not a black couple
would be happy moving into a white neighborhood, but Russ declares the conversation over: the sale of the house is final. Despite Karl’s arguments, Russ refuses to budge.
Claiming he has a responsibility to protect the community, Karl threatens to scare the
buyers away by telling them why they’re getting such a good deal on the property—because
Kenneth committed suicide upstairs. Russ thunders that he doesn’t care about the community, which turned its back on Kenneth when he returned from war a broken man and
treated the family like “the plague” after their son’s suicide. The situation turns violent, and
everyone leaves. Russ tells Bev that he will bury the trunk in the backyard.
ct ii. September 2009. Steve; his pregnant wife, Lindsey; their lawyer, Kathy (the
daughter of Betsy and Karl, who, we learn, moved away from the neighborhood
when Kathy was born); Kevin and his wife, Lena (the great-niece of Lena “Mama”
Younger from Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun); and Tom from the neighborhood property owners association (the son of the realtor who sold the Stollers’ home
in Act i) have gathered to discuss a petition that protests (but cannot legally block) Steve
and Lindsey’s proposed renovation of the house. Steve and Lindsey, who are moving into
Clybourne Park from Glen Meadow, are planning to build a much bigger house on the
property. The property owners association—contacted by a concerned Lena and Kevin
(both African American)—want to ensure that the new home is consistent with the “historically significant” neighborhood’s aesthetic.
While the group attempts to wade through the legalese, they are interrupted by cell
phone calls and by Dan, a handyman who is working on digging up a dead crepe myrtle
tree in the backyard. Lena finally loses her patience, feeling that she is the only one taking the matter at hand seriously: she takes great pride in Clybourne Park’s history of
African American struggle. This house in particular has personal resonance for her, as her
great-aunt lived here and was the first person of color to move into the neighborhood. A
heated argument about racism, reverse racism, gentrification, sexism, and marginalization
ensues, during which Dan enters dragging a trunk he has unearthed beneath the tree. The
squabble succeeds in offending everyone, and everyone leaves. Dan manages to get the
trunk open. He finds a letter written by Kenneth to his parents. As Dan reads the letter,
2009 dissolves into the day that Kenneth committed suicide. Kenneth is writing the letter
to his parents as Francine arrives to start the housework; his mother, who overslept, comes
down from bed to reassure her son that the world is going to change for the better.
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the freedom to provoke
An Interview with Playwright Bruce Norris
by beatrice basso (with an introduction by dan rubin)
ince making his 1992 playwriting debut with The Actor Retires,
playwright Bruce Norris has earned
a reputation for unceremoniously
prodding the uncomfortable truths
that lie just beneath the surface of
the self-aware, middle-class liberal.
“There’s nothing better than the
feeling of coming into the room
and feeling that something dangerous is happening,” he recently Clybourne Park playwright Bruce Norris (left) with director Jonathan
told London’s Evening Standard Moscone on the first day of rehearsal at A.C.T.
upon winning the paper’s Best Play
Award for Clybourne Park. The Actor Retires was a shift for Houston-born Norris, who
up to that point had enjoyed a successful career as an actor. After graduating from
Northwestern University in 1982 with a theater degree, he worked at the major Chicago
theaters—Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the Goodman Theatre, and Victory Gardens
Theater, among others—before moving to New York, where he was seen on Broadway in
Biloxi Blues, An American Daughter, and Wrong Mountain. He also performed off Broadway
and regionally, and was, he says, “hired and fired from a number of television pilots.” These
experiences were fodder for his first play, a comedy about an actor who throws out his
headshots, fires his agent, and decides to make furniture for a living. Today Norris is not
building furniture—in fact, he originally planned to be a set designer before he discovered
it involved “too much manual labor”—but over the past two decades he has built quite a
body of work as a playwright known for his ability to make his audiences simultaneously
laugh and squirm.
Norris’s 2004 hit, The Pain and the Itch, certainly had this effect at Steppenwolf, which
has produced five of his premieres, including The Infidel (2000), Purple Heart (2002), We
All Went Down to Amsterdam (2003), and The Unmentionables (2006). The Pain and the Itch
takes place over a Thanksgiving dinner amid post–9 ⁄ 11 paranoia in a suburban home. A
self-professed liberal and well-balanced couple must deal with inexplicably half-gnawed
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avocadoes and the genital rash of the family’s four-year-old daughter, while the husband’s
brother skewers the hypocrisy of their lives and his Eastern European female guest casually rattles off racist quips. The production went on to win Chicago’s prestigious Joseph
Jefferson Award for Best New Work.
“I have no cogent manifesto,” Norris told London’s Observer in 2007 after The Pain
and the Itch opened at the Royal Court Theatre. “I just have a whole bunch of psychological kinks. [Like] the desire to unmask the lies about American family.” Unlike Lorraine
Hansberry—whose seminal 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun served as the jumping-off point
for Clybourne Park—Norris does not believe that theater is a particularly good catalyst for
change. “There is no political value in having sensitive feelings about the world. I don’t
think it generates political action. You go, you watch, you say, ‘That’s sad,’ and then you
go for a steak. The best you can hope for is to make people slightly uncomfortable. At
least if you take the piss out of the audience, they feel they are being addressed,” he argues.
This is also why he writes plays with white middle-class characters. “Why should I write
something that is not germane to audiences’ lives? Theater has always been an expensive
middle-class pursuit. It is a precious, pretentious thing for precious, pretentious people.
You drive in your expensive car to the theater, get it valet parked, and then watch a play
about poor people. Why?”
Norris exposes the hypocrisies of bourgeois America, without indicting or protecting
anyone in the process. Whenever we are tempted to side with one of his characters over
another, to align ourselves with a seemingly safe and sound modus operandi, or to condemn
someone once and for all, Norris pulls the rug out from under that character (and us), and
we’re left to look for our next psychological alliance. Fundamentally, every one of Norris’s
characters is trying to do and say the right thing for themselves and their loved ones. But
they fail because they are forced into unfamiliar interactions with unfamiliar people. Are
our liberal ideals sustainable outside the safety of the middle-class, suburban bubble? he
forces us to ask.
On the first day of rehearsals for Clybourne Park at a.c.t., Norris remarked that A
Raisin in the Sun, which was part of school curricula in the 1970s, was one of the first plays
(along with Our Town) that he became aware of as a young person. “That play has resonated all through my life because I realized that the only character I could identify with
was Karl—I was a whitey in an all-white neighborhood in Houston, Texas.” In Clybourne
Park, Norris focuses his sharp lens on our past (1959 in Act i) and present (2009 in Act ii)
consciousness of race and neighborly relations. The play has had successful runs in New
York, Washington, d.c., and London. In a phone interview a few weeks before rehearsals
began in San Francisco, Clybourne Park production dramaturg Beatrice Basso asked Norris
his views on race relations in the United States and his need to provoke.
CLYBOURNE PARK is so quintessentially american, yet it is doing very
well in london right now. why do you think that is?
The issues are pretty close. They’ve got a version of the same thing in London. There may
be a different ethnic distribution of who’s resentful towards whom, but the same thing
happens again and again. In fact, one of the guys in the cast living in Brixton told me the
story of that neighborhood and how it has changed over the years. It’s the same thing,
really.
and yet the white-black divide is nowhere more pronounced than
in the united states.
Chicago is particularly distinct that way. The South Side of Chicago is a predominantly
black area; the North Side of Chicago is white. And then you’ve got Indian and South
Asian and other neighborhoods, but the white and black are pretty much divided along
the north and south. You think, this is a function of discrimination or of people being
priced out of the housing market or all sorts of conspiracy theories, and yet, at the same
time, there’s nothing keeping one of us white people from moving into Harlem or South
Chicago or Oakland. Or the other way around. Even if prices in white neighborhoods are
higher, how come there’s not more movement? How come we don’t voluntarily integrate?
how come?
I think it has to do with discomfort—with feeling like you’re the minority. It’s uncomfortable to live in an area where you are that minority, no matter which way it works.
people who are not from the united states, and i am one of them,
complain that there’s so much political correctness about race
here that it ’s impossible to make jokes about it; but then the
longer we are here, the clearer it becomes that there are scars
that are simply too deep to be made fun of.
I was reading something recently about a person in Germany who made what he thought
was a funny remark about Nazis, and of course that’s not actually a very funny subject
if you’re German. There are certain topics like slavery and black-white relations in the
United States that are not that funny, especially if you’re a black person.
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then to be politically correct is a necessary step in societal
evolution. is it a step?
Yes, theoretically it’s a step. So, now that we’ve all been very careful, you think that after
some time goes by things will be normalized. We white people (because we are the oppressors) sit around going, “Is it time now? Has enough time elapsed? Can we now say ‘nigger’?” But of course that never happens, so white people feel resentful because we realize
the past is going to hang around our necks like millstones forever. There is no end. Even
if we gave reparation payments, still it wouldn’t be enough.
and yet a lot has changed, in a relatively short number of years.
Well, a lot of superficial changes have happened, to laws and to ways people have access
to education and to public services, but what hasn’t changed and what stubbornly refuses
to change are our natures. We keep wanting to be around those we feel more comfortable
with. If only legislation could change what we are actually like, but it can’t.
you’re saying it ’s about our basic human makeup.
I think that racism is just another version of the same thing that leads to wars of any kind.
Either it’s tribal solidarity or it’s religious solidarity, or it’s people who live within a certain geographic boundary and want to protect it. There are certain economic and cultural
groups that we identify ourselves with, and we think others shouldn’t be able to interfere.
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and yet we are so fascinated by the other.
But it’s a constantly changing category. So, for example, Steve and Lindsey [the white
couple in Act ii of Clybourne Park who are about to purchase and renovate a home in a
gentrifying neighborhood] imagine that they’re very close to Kevin and Lena [the black
couple who are fighting to preserve the neighborhood’s history]. They think, “We’re just
the same: they are in our same age group, same professional level, they seem politically
like-minded.” They make all these assumptions, and yet from Kevin and Lena’s point of
view, there is no illusion that they are the same. The one person in the second act whom
everyone agrees is not the same is Dan. The guy digs ditches for a living, so no one pays
attention to him.
we assign worth to certain values that we think identify us as
belonging to a particular category of people, like a certain standard of “taste,” which is a charged word in your play.
Taste is an emblem of your group. And it’s just a manifestation of the competition that’s
going on with all people all the time. We are all looking at each other going, “Am I above
or below him, or her?” “Does she have an advantage over me, or do I have an advantage
over her?” So if you’re in any minority group and you look at all these white people walking
around with all this privilege all the time, taking it for granted, you don’t buy it when they
say, “Oh, we’re just like you,” because, at any given moment, you know that even something
as insignificant as taste—“I like this house better than that house, it’s prettier”—identifies
us as part of a group that looks at another group skeptically or critically.
that is true of the destinations one chooses to go to on holiday,
for example, or taste in food.
It used to be that the elites in a city would demonstrate their expertise in food by shopping
at expensive stores that sold food from far away—cheese from France, etcetera—but now
the way you demonstrate how sophisticated you are is by only eating things from your local
area. You have to be a “locavore.” You have to keep up with these things, otherwise people
will look down on you.
what’s sneaky is that when i shift my habits or taste, i perceive
them as a genuine manifestation of who i am, but it makes sense
that i’m actually subconsciously subjecting myself to a pervasive
new trend telling me how to be au courant.
And of course that’s what’s dividing red states versus blue states, too, because those of us
who live in New York or San Francisco look down on the people who vote for Sarah Palin
or for eating frozen dinners or at Outback Steakhouse. We think that’s low class. And they
know we think that. So they don’t like us because they think we are snobs. We are snobs.
The only thing you can do is try not to be part of any group. Maybe.
so you’re suggesting a certain sort of independence?
It’s hard, because anyone who looks at you will put you in a group whether you think you’re
in a group or not. So just saying “I’m not part of any group” would immediately put you
in a group.
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yes, the group of “the iconoclasts.”
Exactly.
it seems to me that in your writing you have a lot of freedom to
provoke and to expose certain illusions. do you have fun with that
freedom?
I guess. It’s hard to say. That’s like asking, “You have brown hair; do you like having brown
hair?” It’s all I’ve ever had. Except that, now it’a gray.
then what made you a provocateur?
I have no idea. Probably my place in my family, the role I filled. I’m the one who liked to
try to start arguments between my two siblings. I did that at Thanksgiving just recently. It’s
not a very nice way to behave, but there are more important things than being nice, I guess.
so why the provocative revelation of the foibles of middle-class
educated people?
I get into these conversations a lot. People ask how come I don’t write plays about, say,
people in housing projects, and I say, “Well, because those are not the people who go to the
theater.” You can say, “We should get them to the theater,” but in actual fact, people who
buy subscriptions to a.c.t. are usually wealthy people. They are almost always wealthy, liberal people. So why not write plays that are about those people, since those are the people
who are in the audience? If you actually want to have a conversation with that audience,
then you should address them directly. That’s what I always think.
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woolly mammoth theatre company is bringing the play back to d.c.
this summer because of the impact it’s had on that community,
which stands as proof that the play, though set in chicago, could
work in any metropolitan reality.
Pretty much every big city has some version of this. Even where I grew up in Houston,
it’s a similar thing. There is no actual Clybourne Park in Chicago. Or, to be strictly accurate, there is a playground called Clybourn [sic] Park on Clybourn Avenue, but there
is no neighborhood called Clybourne [or Clybourn] Park. That is something Lorraine
Hansberry made up. If you want to have an example of the kind of neighborhood we’re
talking about, it would be Wicker Park or Ukrainian Village in Chicago. More Wicker
Park. Wicker Park is a neighborhood that was mostly Latino for about 25 years, and it’s
very close to where Cabrini-Green used to be. Cabrini-Green was a big, dangerous housing project, which is about three or four blocks from where Steppenwolf Theatre is now.
steppenwolf is a sort of alma mater of yours, having produced a
number of your plays. although you’ve lived in new york for quite
a while now, you’re still considered a “chicago playwright,”
following a “chicago aesthetic.” what is that, anyway?
At this point, I don’t know. If you’re talking about 15 or 20 years ago, it probably meant a
kind of propulsive naturalism, a very macho style of acting and directing. The playwriting
was a sort of terse, clipped dialogue like David Mamet’s. Mamet is the person everyone
refers to as a “Chicago-style playwright,” but there’s no other Chicago-style playwriting.
You might as well call it the Mamet style. But that’s changed so much over the past 20
years because there are so many theaters in Chicago now and such a diversity of styles. I
don’t think there’s any such thing as a Chicago style of writing anymore.
but you still identify with that rawness in some way?
Again, that’s like asking, “What’s it like to be different from you?” I became an adult in
Chicago; I lived there for about 20 years. So I’m sure my taste in theater was informed by
what I saw at places like the Goodman and Steppenwolf and all those theater companies.
since you are both an actor and a writer, was chicago’s influence
on you as much about acting as about writing?
I would say it was more about the acting.
you acted here at a.c.t. in WRONG MOUNTAIN in 1999 . . .
Yes, I did. When I was in my 20s, the thing I mostly wanted to be was an actor, but then
I didn’t really understand that the structure of theater was such that an actor has virtually
no power. I’m not saying that’s bad, but it’s like being a violinist in an orchestra—you don’t
have as much power as a conductor. That’s how it should be, but I wanted to have more
power because I was power hungry, I think. And I wanted to be able to express what I
thought, rather than be the vehicle for the expression of someone else’s thoughts. I think
that’s why I wanted to be a writer instead of an actor.
when you write, do you imagine yourself in some of the roles?
Oh, in all of them. Every single one of them. I don’t think I would know how to write a
character if I couldn’t imagine playing it. In my play The Unmentionables, one of my favor-
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ite characters was this black woman, a government figure, and I would amuse myself by
trying to say out loud the things I wanted her to say. It’s a process of improvising in your
apartment—alone—and then writing it all down.
so much of what you write makes one laugh or makes one cringe . . .
Tim Sanford—who runs Playwrights Horizons in New York [where Clybourne Park premiered last February]—was referring to a critical theorist he’s read, who says that tragedy
is only possible in a community where everyone shares the same sense of themselves,
where everyone has the same identity, and they’re part of a shared community. In a modern society as fragmented and atomized as ours, that’s not really possible. Interestingly,
in Clybourne Park, the first part is a tragedy and the second part is a comedy, [because]
the people in the first act all understand each other much more than the people do in the
second act. In the second act, everybody makes assumptions.
and everybody seems to self-edit much more . . .
Absolutely. Everyone holds their tongue, because we live in a society where speech is much
more dangerous than activity—than action. Look at the WikiLeaks thing. All we’re talking about is that someone said out loud what we already knew or have been thinking, but
now it’s on the record. That’s a terrible thing in our weirdly polite society. No one knows
that they should be embarrassed in the first act; everyone knows they should be embarrassed in the second act. We’re embarrassed about everything.
do you like to see people laugh, or cringe, in recognition?
Cringing and laughing are two really good things. So if audiences do them at the same
time, that’s great. I always like it when the audience’s response is really mixed up, when
they don’t know whether to laugh or to cringe.
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having seen three productions of this play, do you find each very
different from the next?
They’ve all been surprisingly similar, actually, and that’s gratifying when you work on a
new play. I mean, every production is going to be necessarily different because of different
actors and different everything, but I notice the similarities more than the differences. For
example, all the people who have played Russ[, the husband who owns the house being
sold in the first act,] tend to be the same sort of actor and seem to find many similar things
in the character. In the second act, the people who play Kathy[, the lawyer defending the
house renovation,] also tend to find similar things. In terms of new discoveries, I don’t
really know.
but you’re still curious.
Sure. Of course. I wouldn’t be coming out there [to San Francisco] to sit around with these
guys [for the first several days of rehearsals] if I didn’t still care about the play.
are you usually pretty involved in rehearsals, or are you the
quiet playwright in the corner?
Oh, you can’t shut me up. I’m like a secondary director. That developed at Steppenwolf
with a director named Anna Shapiro. I just got very comfortable shooting my mouth off in
rehearsals. During a first production of a new play, that can be very helpful because there is
no body of knowledge to draw upon. No one has any idea what the play is supposed to be.
And I think it’s useful not only for the cast but also for the playwright to have to articulate
again and again what he meant. I feel there are a lot of playwrights now who have only
a vague understanding of what they’ve written. They write in a kind of instinctive, fuzzy,
poetic way, and they don’t actually know what they want it to be. I’m very, very specific
about what I think a story is supposed to be.
i agree that there’s some cultivation of the aloof writer these
days—the writer who doesn’t answer questions in rehearsals.
And I think that’s been helped by a sort of director movement, where the director becomes
a kind of coauthor of the play. I’ve actually gotten into trouble with that when a couple of
directors decided that they wanted to add to or fix my play. I said to them, “That’s not your
job. It’s not your place to add things to my play. You’re not a collaborator in that sense.” I
know this sounds incredibly arrogant and antidemocratic, but the hierarchy in theater is
very clear. A person writes a play, and then the other people are there to execute that play.
in the states it is. that’s not true everywhere.
I know, I know. Believe me, I’m well aware that in Europe, for example, the director can
be a kind of auteur. But then my position is, “Get yourself a different play. Not my play.”
do you prefer writing specifically for the theater?
I haven’t written for anything else, so I don’t know. I don’t really want to write for film or
tv, again because of power. I don’t want to lose control. I don’t want to share. I don’t want
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to have some film director say, “I have a vision for your script.” I was an actor, and I think
theater is where my instinct is. I don’t actually even enjoy novels very much.
yet writing for the theater is so much harder and more unforgiving than any other medium, i believe.
I have a friend who writes both plays and novels, and I asked him what the difference is.
He said that with a novel you just keep writing, you don’t stop. With a play, you go, “Well,
I have to take that out, I have to cut this, and I have to remove that.” He said that playwriting is a process of subtraction, whereas novel writing is all about addition. You can
write a 2,000-page novel and it’s acceptable.
do you subtract a lot as you write?
Oh, yes. I would say I throw out twice as much as I write on any given play. I always start
with a lot of stuff, and I just take it away. With Clybourne Park I threw out an entire second
act and rewrote it from scratch.
with the same structure, though, with the jump from 1959 to the
present?
It was based in the present and some of the characters were the same, but it was just very
different, and the end was terrible. So I threw it out and started over.
is there something new you’re working on now?
Yes, I’ve been commissioned to write three plays in the next three years.
and you have ideas already?
Yes.
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secret ideas?
Roughly speaking, I’m hoping to write about three things: sex, evolution, and economics.
aging 50 years in 15 minutes
An Interview with Scenic Designer Ralph Funicello
by emily hoffman
R
alph Funicello is something of a legend at a.c.t. “He’s the all-star,” says Artistic
Director Carey Perloff. “He was one of the original designers here and he really
taught me how to use our theater; he showed me where the sweet spots are.” Since beginning with the company in 1972, Funicello has designed more than 50 productions for a.c.t.,
making him a veritable master of the American Conservatory Theater stage.
A Tony Award nominee for his design of the 2004 Broadway production of Henry iv,
and winner of the Michael Merritt Award for Excellence in Design and Collaboration as
well as awards from the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle, the Los Angeles
Drama Critics Circle, Drama-Logue magazine, Back Stage West, and the u.s. Institute for
Theatre Technology, Funicello has graced stages around the country with his design, as
well as stages in Canada (Stratford Shakespeare Festival) and England (Royal Shakespeare
Company).
Funicello is the Don Powell Chair in Scene Design at San Diego State University,
where he teaches while designing multiple shows each year. He was excited to speak with
us, on the phone from San Diego, about the challenges—aesthetic, physical, and political—of designing Clybourne Park.
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Photo of the set model for Clybourne Park by scenic designer Ralph Funicello
let ’s jump right in: what does this house look like? since CLYBOURNE
is not an actual neighborhood in chicago, what look are you
going for?
[Clybourne Park director] Jon [Moscone] told me the playwright was interested in a house
in what is known as the Bungalow Belt surrounding downtown Chicago. It’s interesting:
that’s an architecture I’ve been designing again and again this past season. In fact, when
Jon and I were meeting, I had just designed two Neil Simon plays, Brighton Beach Memoirs
and Broadway Bound, which take place in a bungalow out in Brighton Beach [New York].
Brighton Beach bungalows are a bit different from the ones in Chicago. Certainly from
the outside, I think the Chicago ones are a bit nicer, at least to our modern sensibilities.
PARK
what do the chicago bungalows look like?
They’re primarily brick Craftsman houses that have a lot of oak. When they were originally built they had a lot of plain, square oak detailing inside, very much the kind of thing
that [playwright] Bruce [Norris] describes in the play: the built-in sideboard and the
paneling and plate rack in the dining room.
The problem is that we have to make the house look fairly deteriorated for the second
act, so that really necessitated our not doing oak-finished woodwork. But if you figure
that in 1959 this house was already 50 years old, it’s quite possible that the woodwork was
painted. In my own knowledge, because I was alive then—I was a kid in the ’50s, not in a
subdivision but in an older neighborhood back east—even though houses may have had
unpainted, stained woodwork in them when they were built, none of that was apparent
a few decades later. It wasn’t until everyone became interested in Victorian revival in the
late ’60s and ’70s that everyone started stripping off all that paint and trying to expose the
wood again.
14
Bungalow-style homes in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood (2008). Photo by Samuel A. Love.
what view will we get of the house?
The classic ground plan, which has been written into hundreds of plays and every sitcom
up until modern times, has you come in the front door, and there’s a staircase leading
upstairs. In the other direction, as you pass the staircase, somewhere there’s a door that
leads to the kitchen or the dining room. So we ended up with a variation on that.
One thing Jon was interested in was having a very real feeling: that the set not be
theatrical, not theatricalized in any way. Now, those are very big words to throw around.
What does that really mean? What we chose to do was to set all the walls at right angles to
one another, like in a real house, and to cant the set slightly off center so you’re not looking
at the interior of the house head on.
But that means that some of the walls basically move offstage as they go upstage. In
other words, you don’t see some of the walls, and that hidden aspect of it—it’s just very
slight—is sort of interesting to us. The front door is actually not visible to the entire audience, though you know where it is; you know it’s there; you see people come through it.
There’s a window that you can see through out onto the porch outside the front door, so
you see people pass that as they come in the door.
how will you transform the play between the acts? we’re going
from 1959 to 2009, for one thing, but there are also other changes.
It’s interesting: you have to decide what’s changed and why. The playwright gives some
indications, but you have to backtrack and ask, “What happened to this house?” We know
the family from [Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play] A Raisin in the Sun bought this place.
Let’s assume that they bought the house and lived in it. Perhaps at a certain point in time
they redecorated—or didn’t, who knows. Then the house has passed through . . . I mean,
50 years have passed since they bought it, so obviously the house has gone through at least
two or three or four more transitions if it changed hands even every 10 or 15 years. That’s
possible.
Now, it needs to look destroyed. Why? That’s tricky. What you don’t want to do is
have the tasteful bungalow that the white family lived in and then the not-so-tasteful,
trashed-out house that the black people lived in. The play controversially goes there to a
great extent, anyway—how much of that do you want to reinforce? When you look back at
1960s décor you could choose some horrible things; there’s horrible wallpaper, for example.
There is some degradation that you want to see happen. Basically, I’ve decided that
at some point this house was abandoned or foreclosed on or became a rental, and eventually it was shuttered up and then broken into or squatted in. Maybe it was a crack house.
Some awful, awful things happened to it.
15
Paint elevations for the “porno paneling” in Clybourne Park by scenic designer Ralph Funicello
16
so you want it to look degraded rather than tacky?
A little bit tacky. In the entrance hallway, as the playwright suggests [in the stage directions], we’re getting rid of the newel posts and railing on the staircase and replacing them
with an iron railing. We’re also replacing all of the wallpaper in that area with rec-roomlooking wood paneling. What that is now called, believe it or not, is “porno paneling.” I
guess in the ’70s that was the easy way to build scenery for all those porno movies—you just
went to the hardware store and bought that paneling and nailed it to a flat to make a bedroom. It’s hard to find now! The wallpaper downstairs will be covered with that, which will
make a huge difference, and that can have some graffiti on it and be abused and beat up.
Maybe it became a rooming house? Or it was broken up into apartments? That’s a
renovation that would be really hard to show. We do have 18-foot walls downstage, and it’s
very, very hard to change those. With a budget of infinite scope and scale, you could just
build the set twice and revolve it. But with these walls, we figured if you have curtains and
drapery on the windows then you won’t really see what that woodwork looks like, so you
can make it pretty nasty underneath and then get rid of the drapes at intermission. There’s
a carpet on what looks like a wood floor; there’s a wood border around a fairly large area
rug, and underneath that the floor is all rotted out as if there had been a leak at some point
and plywood was put down over it.
The other tack we’re taking is that we’re going to put plastic drop cloth in the windows
in the second act to make it look like the house has been boarded up. If the house has been
boarded up and [the new owners are] just in the process of starting to think about what
they’re doing, or someone just bought it and took the plywood off the windows, what they
might do is put up plastic. It protects from the weather but lets light in.
For things that we can’t change, like the carpeting on the stairs, we’re going to sprinkle
quite a bit of something we will develop that will look like fallen plaster and dust and
chipped paint. If it’s vacuumed for the first act it’s fairly okay, and for the second act you
sprinkle the stuff on the carpet and it can really be awful looking. Thank god we’re going
in this [chronological] direction and not the other direction. We have more time to clean
between performances than we would at intermission.
still, it ’s going to be a very busy intermission for the stage crew.
Yes. Hopefully they’ll be able to do it—because they’ll have a lot of furniture to remove,
and then walls to remove. I think the concession stand will make a lot of money! It’s a lot
of work for 15 minutes.
how do you think the degradation of the house will affect the
audience’s response to the second act? is the fact that it’s falling apart likely to make them side with steve and lindsey rather
than with kevin and lena, who don’t want to see major changes
made to the house?
My sense is that when [Kevin and Lena] talk about preservation they’re talking about a
restoration of the house, which you could easily do in my version of it. You have to wonder:
What are Lindsey and Steve going to build? They want to tear down this house, I believe.
i would imagine that CLYBOURNE PARK is a challenging play to design
in that the aesthetic choices you have to make as a designer
become very political. have you designed plays in the past where
the design choices are similarly politicized?
I’ve designed a lot of plays that have political overtones, including “Master Harold”…and
the boys at a.c.t., for instance. I’ve done that play twice, but the extraordinary production
was at a.c.t. I don’t know if the set is political, though.
17
Another one we did at a.c.t. was Charles Randolph-Wright’s production of [the 16thcentury Molière comedy] Tartuffe. Charles is an African American director who grew up
in North Carolina in the ’60s; he knew that there was a very wealthy African American
community there that was completely isolated from the rest of the black community, and
isolated from the white community because it was still a fairly segregated time. The money
was old money from farming and such. He wanted to set the play in this community in
1960 and got permission to do that from [translator] Richard Wilbur. It was the funniest
production of Tartuffe I have ever done. It played a little bit on nouveau riche taste; the
lampshades were still in the plastic. The furniture was all white; the floor was white carpet. It was a sort of plantation-looking house with a big sweeping staircase. Tartuffe was a
cross between Reverend Ike and Little Richard in a sort of purple cape. Reverend Ike was
a black evangelical preacher in the ’60s who basically believed that if you gave him your
money, God would give you money; he had a huge following.
Those certainly could be viewed as controversial choices. But I’ve never really done
anything like Clybourne Park.
to signify or not to signify
Costume Designer Katherine Roth on Clybourne Park
W
18
hen you look at pictures of other eras things are pretty delineated: your clothes
say what group you belong to, what you do for a living. Today (maybe because of
democracy?), a really rich guy will wear the same hoodie and jeans as a regular guy or as
a street person. Today clothes are not meant to signify. They, in fact, do the opposite: they
have some erasing qualities.
In the first half of Clybourne Park[, which is set in 1959,] there are uniforms—implied
and actual. There’s the maid’s uniform, of course; there’s the son, whom you don’t see in the
first act, but because you know he was in the military it’s almost like that uniform is there
somehow; and, of course, then there’s the minister with his collar. That pretty much says it
right there: you just respond differently to someone who’s wearing a collar than to someone
who’s not. Actually, my dad was a Protestant minister in the late ’50s. I remember he only
wore his collar on Sundays. So I think even in the late ’50s it was starting to shift. People
were moving out of that signifying-who-they-are-to-the-world thing. When [director]
Jon [Moscone] and [playwright] Bruce [Norris] and I were talking about Francine, Bruce
remembered that he had a family maid—or maybe he was talking about a friend—and he
said, “You know, actually I think she wore her own clothes and a smock.” So it was starting to shift. But for the purposes of this play we’ve decided to try to keep people in their
uniforms [in the first act] to really hit it home.
Then you shift to the second act, and as an audience member you don’t have the same
distance. It’s not, “Oh, this was a long time ago.” This is now. This is us. And I think it’s
really important that the clothes don’t say anything. Luckily most of our clothes don’t say
anything. When we were sitting around the table yesterday [at the first rehearsal], I was
thinking we could all undress and pass our clothes one to the left and most of us would not
lose anything in terms of our “self-expression.” Chances are you wear jeans and a t-shirt
most of the time. When I first read [Clybourne Park] I said to Jon, “I think everyone should
be in pants, a t-shirt, and an open, button-front shirt. One could be pink, and one could be
velvet; it could be all different but essentially the same, the same silhouette.” Because we
do that. It’s really, not a genericness, but a sort of enforced generalness.
I was talking to Omozé [Idehenre, who plays Francine and Lena,] today when I was
doing her fitting, and we were saying that we could dress Lena as really forthright. We
could give her dreads, we could do all that counterculture stuff, but I think then the audience would expect that she’s the ball-buster in the scene, and actually she’s not. In the same
way, we could give Mano[el Felciano, who plays Jim, Tom, and Kenneth] some beautiful
pale green loafers and everyone would know Tom’s gay, but that doesn’t help the play in
that moment of “Oh, shit, yeah, right, ooh, I shouldn’t have said that because you’re here.”
I think we can’t signal anything with the clothes in the second act. I think it would
really screw up the audience’s ability to go through the steps with the people on the stage.
I haven’t really started designing Act ii yet, because I want to look at the actors more,
because I think it has a lot to do with their bodies. I have to see what they wear naturally,
watch them in a room with what they came in wearing, because, technically, they should
be able to do the show that way. We just want to make sure that we don’t inadvertently say
something we don’t need to say.
On the other hand, when we do find out that Mano is playing a gay guy, it should not
be, “What?!” It should be, “Oh, I thought he was just like Seinfeld, I thought he was just
fastidious, but he’s gay”—or whatever the assumptions are today. Because that’s the whole
point of the play—challenging you on every single assumption you make. You can’t help
making them, because if you’re breathing you make assumptions.
19
what is gentrification?
by dan rubin
F
20
or some residents of lower- or workinggen·try n. People of gentle birth, good
class neighborhoods, gentrification means
breeding, or high social position.
new buildings on lots long vacant and the
demolition of derelict spaces; improvements
to public works like libraries, parks, transportation, streets, sidewalks, and lighting; the
arrival of new businesses with competitively priced goods and greater selection; more local
jobs; an increase in property values; a decrease in crime; an investment in the aesthetics of
the neighborhood. For these residents, gentrification means a new sense of pride in their
community. For others, however, it means something drastically different. It means the
displacement of familiar neighbors and, for those remaining, an increased cost of living in
an area more oriented towards the newly arrived middle and upper classes. It means being
victimized by predatory lenders and unscrupulous developers. It means evictions. It means
the loss of independently owned businesses and an influx of chain stores and cookie-cutter
houses. It means the loss of the neighborhood’s cultural and historical identity.
Sociologists cannot agree on a definition for gentrification, either. Some use the term
interchangeably with urban revitalization to describe any commercial or urban improvement, whether funded by the private or public sector. Others are specifically referring to
the improvements set into motion by the economic actions of newcomers to an area. Some
translate gentrification simply as the visible upgrading of a blighted area, while others
investigate what they perceive as a conspiracy of government and business interests purposefully disinvesting and then reinvesting in a particular neighborhood in order to turn a
profit. For many, gentrification is synonymous with displacement, specifically the displacement of racial minorities to make room for more affluent white consumers.
The term has never been innocuous. When British sociologist Ruth Glass coined it in
her 1964 article “Aspects of Change in London,” she depicted a culture under attack:
One by one, many of the working class quarters of London have been invaded
by the middle classes, upper and lower. Shabby, modest mews and cottages—
two rooms up and two down—have been taken over, when their leases have
expired, and have become elegant, expensive residences. Large Victorian
houses, downgraded in an earlier or recent period—which were used as lodging houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation—have been upgraded
Where the Negro and White Sections on the South Side Meet,
the White and Negro Children Sometimes Play Together,
Chicago, Illinois, by Russell Lee (1941). Farm Security
Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection,
Library of Congress, LC-DIG-fsa-8a29887.
once again. Nowadays, many of these
houses are being subdivided into
costly flats or “houselets” (in terms of
the new real estate snob jargon). The
current social status and value of such
dwellings are frequently in inverse
relation to their size, and in any
case enormously inflated by comparison with previous levels in their
neighbourhoods. Once this process
of “gentrification” starts in a district,
it goes on rapidly until all or most of
the original working class occupiers
are displaced, and the whole social
character of the district is changed.
Sticking to the term’s original usage, we
might define gentrification as the process
by which the arrival of new amenities and higher-income residents causes a neighborhood’s essential character to change, both in terms of population and aesthetics.
As Bruce Norris does in Clybourne Park, many sociologists link gentrification to an earlier
phenomenon—white flight and the suburbanization of America. “First one [white] family
will leave,” predicts the play’s Karl Lindner, if Bev and Russ sell their house to the African
American Younger family. “Then another, and another, and each time they do, the values of
these properties will decline, and once that process begins, once you break that egg, Bev, all
the king’s horses, etcetera.” As we learn in the play’s second act, this is precisely what occurs
in the fictional Clybourne Park, and it is what occurred in major metropolitan areas across
the United States around the middle of the 20th century. Between the 1940s and the 1960s,
the departure of white residents from the inner city led to vacancies, a lower median income,
and a weaker tax base. “Suburbanization . . . has selectively pulled affluent households out of
urban jurisdictions,” explains professor Jacob L. Vigdor in his Brookings-Wharton Papers on
Urban Affairs article, provocatively titled “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?” “The leaders of these jurisdictions are left with the prospect of satisfying more concentrated demands
for services with a dwindling tax base, realizing that further increasing the burden they
place on residents will simply drive more of them away. In the process, cities have become
concentrated centers of poverty, joblessness, crime, and other social pathologies.”
21
22
To combat these problems, some city governments established commissions charged
with the revitalization of such areas. San Francisco, for example, has reinvested $50 million
in the Western Addition since designating the district a “redevelopment area” in 1948. “To
reduce blight by making building and streetscape improvements that would attract new
business customers, residents, and visitors to the Fillmore,” the Redevelopment Agency
of San Francisco bought out 4,729 households and razed 2,500 Victorian homes, leaving
properties vacant for years. Over 800 local businesses closed. “They wiped out our community, weakened our institutional base, and never carried out their promise to bring people
back,” lamented Rev. Amos Brown, a neighborhood pastor, in 2008.
This decades-long municipal project is, however, severe compared to the histories of
most gentrifying areas. Even without invasive governmental involvement, the 1960s and
1970s saw an end to the unidirectional exodus of educated and affluent residents from
urban centers. In the 1970s, the repopulation of these areas began. As cities transformed
from industrial centers into economic, entertainment, and information-service hubs,
young professionals attracted to the amenities of an urban lifestyle started to move back.
So, too, did a number of artists taking advantage of relatively low rents.
As urban neighborhoods gained reputations for being hip, young, and culturally diverse,
pioneering real-estate investors, sensing a climate change and supported by the policies of
local governments hungry for a healthier tax base, began buying up property, gambling
that the value of these investments would increase as the area revitalized. As new and
renovated housing appeared, more financially well-off buyers and renters moved in. The
cycle perpetuated itself, and reverse white flight followed: first one family moved in, then
another, and another, and each time they did, the value of these properties increased; once
that process began, once that egg was broken, all the king’s horses, etcetera.
Except, it wasn’t families who moved in. The typical incoming gentry were highly
educated professionals with few children. Working-class communities structured around
family began to see fewer children playing in their streets and more young adults walking
dogs—who, moreover, complained about the kids playing in the street. Us-versus-them
tensions are common in gentrifying neighborhoods, as the current residents feel their
values undermined by the lifestyle choices of outsiders. Many are skeptical about improvements being made. Yes, the street has been paved, but why wasn’t it paved during the last
15 years? Yes, crime is down, but why do the police respond more quickly after middle-class
residents move in? Current residents frequently have “a sense that new residents matter
more to the city and have more power . . . [and] a feeling that current residents are blamed
by new residents for the community’s problems. City beautification efforts are sometimes
seen not only as ‘welcome mats’ for gentrifiers, but more importantly, the result of the ‘new
rich’ in gentrified communities having
more clout to get the city to make such
improvements,” the Loyola University
Chicago Center for Urban Research
and Learning found in interviews conducted in four gentrifying Chicago
communities in 2006.
These feelings are especially prevalent with respect to the construction of new housing, the most visible
mark of the onset of gentrification. The
Loyola study explains that “the physical
appearance of new development is seen
as being insensitive to the visual character of the existing community. New
houses are described as ‘cookie-cutter’
houses that threaten the distinctiveness of the community.” In part, this
disconnect exists because developers are
not creating new housing for the current population, but for the next wave
of wealthier residents. In Chicago’s
West Town area—the closest realworld equivalent to Norris’s Clybourne
Park—and the waterlocked city of San
Francisco, there is no vacant land to act
as a buffer between new investment and
existing properties, so “reinvestment is
taking the form of either an immediate
purchase/teardown/new construction
process, or conversion of existing properties into condos, directly displacing
existing renters.” Current residents are
not just witnessing the creation of new
properties, but the destruction of old
ones to make room for newcomers.
T
he average non-Hispanic white person
continues to live in a neighborhood that
looks very different from neighborhoods
where the average black, Hispanic, and
Asian live. Average whites in metropolitan
America live in a neighborhood that’s 74%
white—although it’s not as segregated as in
1980, when the average was 88% white. . . .
Blacks continue to be the most segregated minority followed by Hispanics and
Asians. The average black American lives
in a majority black neighborhood. . . . Much
of the decline in segregation in recent
decades was due to the rise of the black
middle-class and its move to suburbia.
[Roderick] Harrison [a demographer at the
Joint Center for Political and Economic
Studies] expects that the recession,
which has cut jobs and reduced mobility,
may push segregation rates up again. “I
wouldn’t be surprised if the recession had a
polarizing effect,” Harrison says.
Segregation levels among Hispanics are
nearing those of blacks. On average, 48%
of Hispanics’ neighbors are Hispanic and
that share is growing. “Immigrants naturally
tend to cluster in ethnic communities,”
[John] Logan [a sociology professor at
Brown University] says. “The growth of the
country’s Hispanic and Asian populations
therefore naturally results in more concentrated ethnic enclaves.”
—“Census Data Show
‘Surprising’ Segregation,”
USA Today, December 14, 2010
23
The most prevalent concern regarding gentrification is that the same thing is happening
to current residents. Developers tear down low-cost housing; landlords find some excuse to
evict low-paying tenants; rent and property taxes become unsustainably high for low- and
fixed-income residents. Displacement can “move affected populations further away from
the very housing, education, and employment opportunities that could ameliorate the
problems of past social and economic exclusion,” the Loyola study notes. Professor Sharon
Zukin writes that gentrification causes a “geographical reshuffling” as socioeconomic integration pushes poor households out of one neighborhood into another.
Vigdor, however, argues that the phenomenon of displacement has been overblown.
“While anecdotal evidence suggests that displacement does indeed occur,” he says, “the exit
of less-educated1 households from units in gentrifying areas occurs no more frequently—
and may indeed occur less frequently—than in other areas.” In fact, he shows that, while
gentrification may put a strain on some lower- and working-class families, “poor households are more likely to exit poverty themselves than to be replaced by a nonpoor household.” He contends that most studies fail to take into account that in nongentrifying urban
communities “approximately half of all residents move over a five-year period” and that
“poverty itself is rather transitory in nature: about half of all households entering poverty
in a given year will escape poverty within a year.”
He admits, however, that displacement occurs in proportion to the amount of vacant
space a gentrifying neighborhood begins with. Neighborhoods with empty lots and vacant
residencies are “able to absorb some additional residents without creating significant upward
pressure on land values.” Vigdor used Boston as his case study. In places like Chicago’s West
Town and San Francisco’s Mission district, there was little vacant space to begin with.
People have been displaced, and those people have frequently been minorities.
1. To detach his study of gentrification from the issue of race, Vigdor makes a point of connecting economic standing to educational achievement.
24
SOURCES Leslie Fulbright, “Sad Chapter in Western Addition History Ending,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 2008; Maureen
Kennedy and Paul Leonard, “Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices,” The Brookings
Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, April 2001; ibid., “Gentrification: Practice and Politics,” LISC Online Resource
Library, July 2001; Philip Nyden, Emily Edlynn, and Julie Davis, “The Differential Impact of Gentrification on Communities in
Chicago,” Loyola University Chicago Center for Urban Research and Learning, January 2006; University of Illinois at Chicago,
“Gentrification in West Town: Contested Ground,” Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement,
September 2001; Jacob L. Vigdor, “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor?” Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs (2002):
133–82; Evlin K. Wyly and Daniel J. Hammel, “Capital’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Transformation of American Housing Policy,”
Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 82 (4) (2000): 181–206; Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in
the Urban Core,” Annual Review: Sociology 13 (1987).
chicago: demographics
No Majority
Majority White
Majority Black
Majority Hispanic
Majority Asian
ILLINOIS
25
Adapted from Bill Rankin’s 2009 map on his Radical Cartography website, http://www.radicalcartography.net/index
.html?chicagodots
chicago: selected neighborhoods
Lake Michigan
Lincoln
Park
West Town
Near North Side
Near
West
Side
West Side
Loop
Near South Side
Bridgeport
Douglas (Bronzeville)
Oakland
South Side
Kenwood
Englewood
Hyde Park
Woodlawn
South Shore
26
race and the city
Gentrification in Chicago and San Francisco
by dan rubin
chicago
I
ssues of gentrification are inextricably linked to issues of race. Mid-20th-century white
flight saw the dispersal of cities’ white populations as communities of color moved into
segregated urban neighborhoods. Brokers, practicing what was known as blockbusting,
took advantage of racial prejudice. Convincing white homeowners that the value of their
property would plummet as African American families moved into the community, these
brokers scared them into selling their homes for less than their worth by predicting that it
was still more than they would get if they waited. The brokers would then make a profit
by selling the properties at market price to African American families eager to escape their
overcrowded, impoverished neighborhoods. Areas that had been predominantly European
throughout a city’s history quickly became almost entirely populated by people of color.
This was the case with the Washington Park neighborhood of Woodlawn after Lorraine
Hansberry’s family purchased a building at 6140 S. Rhodes Avenue in 1937. Woodlawn
became an attractive haven for middle-class African American families looking to escape
Chicago’s Black Belt—one of two areas to which the city’s African American population
had been restricted as their numbers burgeoned to nearly 300,000 as a result of the Great
Migration. World War ii’s promise of industrial jobs brought the Second Great Migration,
and Woodlawn received recent southern migrants and lower-class refugees displaced
from redevelopment elsewhere in Chicago. By 1960, Woodlawn was 89 percent African
American. By this time it also had “deteriorating, crowded housing and few commercial
attractions,” according to the Chicago Historical Society. Gangs arrived. “A rash of arsons
destroyed a reported 362 abandoned buildings between 1968 and 1971. Unemployment,
poverty, and crime climbed. Those who could afford to, moved out: Woodlawn’s population declined from a high of 81,279 in 1960 to 27,086 in 2000.” After decades of disinvestment, poverty, and high vacancy rates, Woodlawn seems primed for gentrification.
Gentrification is most often associated with white residents returning to established
minority enclaves, pushing out people of color. “The issue of gentrification has historically included a strong racial component—lower-income African American residents are
replaced by higher-income white residents. In fact, in most (but not all) gentrifying neighborhoods examined in the case studies, minority households (African American as well as
27
28
Latino) have predominated in recent decades,” write Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard
in their 2001 article “Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification.” A
prevailing theme of interviews conducted in 2006 by Loyola University Chicago’s Center
for Urban Research in four Chicago neighborhoods is that different race-based values
and lifestyles “contribute to tensions, conflict, and hostility” in gentrifying communities.
“There’s incredible racist overtones in this entire process. It’s not just a matter of housing
and money necessarily, but also it operates on the realm of ideas and perceptions about this
community, about Puerto Ricans, about blacks, about Mexicans, about what development
should mean and what revitalization means,” a Latino Youth Community Organization
representative from Chicago’s West Town neighborhood told the interviewers.
Significant gentrification has not yet occurred in Woodlawn, but it has begun just to
the north in the historic district of Bronzeville, once a thriving commercial strip and cultural center at the heart of the Black Belt. With the recent demolition of public housing,
construction on vacant lots, and rehabilitation of homes by resident middle-class African
Americans, property values increased by 400 percent between 1999 and 2006. In the face
of changing tides, community leaders are eager to preserve their history, the Loyola study
reports, but aren’t as worried about losing their neighbors. “These [proposals] are not
necessarily linked to plans to reduce residential displacement (which has already occurred)
but rather are connected to the preservation of Chicago’s African American historical
roots on the South Side.” Displacement is not of primary concern in Bronzeville because
the gentrification process there started with an abundance of vacant space. The same was
not true of West Town, another area where African American families historically found
homes but which is more associated with the city’s Puerto Rican and Hispanic population.
The history of West Town—just west of Chicago’s thriving downtown Loop, the
city’s commercial center—is a quintessential gentrification tale, which may be why Bruce
Norris sets Clybourne Park in “the near northwest of central Chicago.” The area (which
contains Wicker Park, Humboldt Park, and Ukrainian Village) was originally settled by a
diverse group of immigrants—Germans, Scandinavians, Poles, Russian Jews, Italians, and
Ukrainians. Coinciding with the post–World War ii housing shortage, it became primarily
a port of entry for Latinos (mostly Puerto Ricans) and Mexicans, who had been displaced
by the revitalization of the Lincoln Park and Old Town neighborhoods north of the Loop.
They comprised 39 percent of West Town’s population by 1970. Turn-of-the-century mansions were converted into multifamily units and rooming houses as the area’s poor and
working-class residency grew. African Americans first settled in the area in the 1930s, and
their numbers grew in the 1970s with the construction of the Noble Square Cooperative
and other subsidized housing in the vicinity. Between 1960 and 1980, the area’s white
population decreased from 98 percent to 55 percent, with many moving to the northwest
edge of the city or the suburbs.
Slum landlords let their properties fall into disrepair, and incidents of arson and insurance fraud were prevalent. In 1978, there were as many as 42 abandoned or burned-out
buildings and 245 empty lots over a 32-block area. Property values plummeted and speculators acquired properties for cheap. With the backing of these investors, the redevelopment process picked up in the 1980s, starting with the Wicker Park neighborhood. Artists
played an important role during this period. A University of Illinois at Chicago (uic) study
entitled “Gentrification in West Town: Contested Ground” notes:
With the increasing presence of artists in Chicago in the 1970s, the demand
for cheap, large spaces for studios spurred the process of redevelopment. Artists
often fell prey to real estate speculators who would offer them large, cheap
rental space, but would later evict them when the time became ripe for gentrification and higher profits. The area around Wicker Park acquired a significant
artist presence. Such a presence was promoted by the real estate industry to
attract upwardly mobile individuals.
At the turn of the 21st century, “West Town was changing again,” writes the Chicago
Historical Society:
The influx of artists, students, and other younger “bohemian” populations drew
more affluent residents. . . . This gentrification subsequently spread . . . with
restaurants, nightclubs, and shops near the cultural landmarks and institutions
created and sustained by earlier residents. The various Latino groups remained
a clear majority into the early 1990s but fell to 47 percent by 2000. Lowerincome residents of West Town have moved to areas further north and west to
escape the area’s rising real-estate values.
Between 1990 and 2000, West Town property values rose by 83 percent on average. The
white population increased from 27 percent to 39 percent. The uic study concludes:
Quite often representatives of the forces of gentrification explained their
actions in racial terms—it is not that they are taking the area away from a
group but that they are doing some type of recovery and civilizing of the area
that deserves a better group and a better treatment. They talked about saving
the area from (minority) low-income residents; they described their culture
with negative connotations; they resented the nationalism of organizations
29
representing them, and, generally, accused such organizations of protecting
drug pushers and of promoting concentrations of poverty/social degradation.
This type of language can be code for racial hostility. Similarly, they claim that
Latinos did not welcome them in the neighborhood, allegedly because they
were whites—rather than for reasons of displacement and racial exclusion. Not
only the lower income Latinos and Blacks but also the middle class Latinos
and Blacks point to racial hostility on the part of white newcomers.
san francisco and the bay area
30
San Francisco is much like Chicago’s West Town: it’s full. In its 1998 anniversary issue, the
San Francisco Bay Guardian printed “The Economic Cleansing of San Francisco,” which
reported that gentrification was responsible for the loss of more than 1,000 low-cost housing units, 2,000 public housing units, and 1,600 rental apartments and the eviction of more
than 8,000 residents since 1995: “San Francisco is being hit with an unnatural disaster of
epic proportions, a socioeconomic transformation that threatens to destroy the heart and
soul of one of the world’s great cities.” Three years later, reporter Cassie Feldman remembers, “When we put out that story, we were marking that particular moment in history.
What we didn’t realize was that in 1998, that was the beginning.”
In fact, 1998 was not the beginning. Following World War ii, city planners and developers came up with a plan to transform San Francisco from “a quaint West Coast port
into an international corporate center of commerce, finance, and administration . . . a
postindustrial corporate center,” explains Brian J. Godfrey in “Urban Development and
Redevelopment in San Francisco.” To this end, the revitalization of central neighborhoods
such as the Western Addition, Haight-Ashbury, the Castro district, Noe Valley, Potrero
Hill, and Bernal Heights have kept gentrification a local political hot-button issue since
the 1970s. In addition to the Western Addition, one of the most dramatically transformed
areas has been soma—the South of Market district. The city’s main zone for casual laborers in the mid-20th century, the district was a concentration of single men and workingclass families. When the city determined it needed a new convention center and office
structures, soma was attractive for its proximity to Market Street’s financial and retail
districts. Despite prolonged protests, tenants were displaced and factories, warehouses, and
residential hotels were torn down or reappropriated. Begun in 1967, the 1.2-million-squarefoot Moscone Convention Center—the core of the 87-acre project—opened in 1981. Yerba
Buena Gardens, an arts and cultural center, opened nearby in 1995, the same year Willie
Brown was elected mayor. Eager to bolster San Francisco’s economic and political influ-
ence in the region, Brown was unabashedly prodevelopment: “We need to develop every
vacant parcel of land in San Francisco to its maximum potential.”
Although San Francisco gentrification began much earlier than 1998, Feldman’s comment was likely a response to the speed with which gentrification took place in the so-called
“dot-com era.” “In the supercharged economy of the San Francisco Bay Area, gentrification creates noticeable changes in neighborhood character in a matter of months,” wrote
Kennedy and Leonard before the 2008 recession hit. Between 1995 and 1997, as a result of
the internet boom, the nine-county Bay Area produced nearly 300,000 new jobs. During
that time, only 31,000 new homes were built. “San Francisco is only 49 square miles. In
order to really build in San Francisco, you have to eliminate something. Who do you want
to eliminate? The people with money? The people with influence?” asked Malik Rahim,
a local public housing organizer, explaining why minorities are often the ones displaced.
One of the most contested areas of the recent past has been the Mission. As Godfrey
writes in Neighborhoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist
Communities, “San Francisco’s Mission district has a long history of ethnic succession.” Early
Native American, Spanish, and Mexican settlers were replaced by Old World immigrants at
the turn of 20th century. Starting in the 1940s, Hispanic and Latino populations congregated
in the Mission as Italians pushed them out of North Beach and post–World War ii immigration from Latin America increased. Hispanics gradually became the majority by 1980, living
alongside working and artisan classes and a plethora of nonprofits.
With the dot-com boom of the mid ’90s, many Mission residents felt their neighborhood becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, 50 miles south of San Francisco,
and years of protests ensued. “We’re seeing literally an invasion of some wealthier elements,
including the dot-coms, including other corporate offices. . . . Fundamentally, the Mission,
along with other neighborhoods in San Francisco, has always allowed working-class families,
and small businesses, and artists, and people with less money than the dot-commers who are
coming in, to be able not only to live here but to flourish,” says Renee Saucedo, attorney for
the Day Laborers Program. The major characteristics of gentrification appeared—good and
bad—but the largest outcry was over evictions and displacement of Hispanics and Latinos.
Mayor Brown admitted in 2001, “People moving into the Mission are in fact replacing the
Latinos. The Latinos have taken money for the run-down structures that they live in, and
they are buying in Daly City, a better structure in some other place. It’s the natural process.
The Mission was not always Latino. The Mission at one time was Irish.”
In San Francisco’s 2010 elections, Nyese Joshua ran for District 10 supervisor on a platform of antigentrification in Bayview–Hunters Point, at the southeast edge of the city limits, along the bay: “I have entered this race to combat destructive social engineering policies,
31
Gentrification Is Predatory Development, by Favianna Rodriguez (2006). favianna.com.
32
such as gang injunctions, massive so-called redevelopment, wisely guised Jim Crowism,
and the wholesale onslaught of displacement of Black families throughout District 10. . . .
I do not believe that the most creative solutions to the great list of challenges our district
faces should be or even can be resolved with the simple removal of the Black population
over and over again.” Historically, African Americans have comprised a small percentage
of San Francisco’s population, making up less than one percent until World War ii, when
they settled in the Western Addition and moved into Bayview–Hunters Point to work the
West Coast’s largest naval shipyard. At their peak in 1970, African Americans comprised
just over 13 percent of the city’s population; today, they make up just under 7 percent. The
escalation of San Francisco property values accounts for some of the steady black migration
from San Francisco across the bay to Oakland and other regions.
Hans Johnson, a demographer with the California Public Policy Institute, calls the
trend in Bayview–Hunters Point “a classic gentrification story.” After the naval yard closed
in 1974, leading to years of disinvestment and blight, the city has turned the area over to its
Redevelopment Agency, which will focus on “economic development, affordable housing,
and community enhancements,” according to the agency’s website. It has also involved the
Lennar Corporation, a Florida-based company that specializes in the conversion of former military bases. “Lennar is transforming the shipyard into new homes, jobs, and parks
that the Bayview–Hunters Point community wants and needs. From start to finish, the
renaissance of the shipyard from a naval base to a new neighborhood has been guided by
a commitment to meeting the needs of the community,” promises the company’s website.
Other improvements have included the new Third Street light-rail line and the burying of
unattractive power lines, as well as selective demolition.
Bayview–Hunters Point resident Arlisa Collins says the changes have mostly been positive: “You have new people coming in, and as people care more about their homes, it makes
the neighborhood safer. I like the new faces. A couple of years ago, you didn’t see a white
woman or an Asian walking down Third Street. Now you do.” Her father, veteran Muni
driver Herman Autry, who has lived in the area since 1947, is skeptical: “They’re fixing
things up, but it isn’t for us. This is all for the new residents.” Her 24-year-old son, Daniel,
also notes the increased cost of living there, and says he misses the feel of the old community. “People considered it the ghetto and wouldn’t visit there,” he said. “But within the
neighborhood, people were closer. You knew your neighbors. The majority of the people I
used to know are no longer here. They’ve moved to Antioch or Richmond.”
Loss of the African American population is not limited to San Francisco. The San
Francisco Chronicle reported in 2008, “Flight has been greatest in the most urban counties,
with San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Alameda collectively losing more than
20 percent of their black residents. Many have moved to the Bay Area’s outer suburbs—
particularly Solano and eastern Contra Costa counties—while others have left the region
altogether.” One of the sharpest declines has come in Oakland, where San Francisco’s
overflow has led to the displacement of longtime residents. “It’s like a hurricane, and by
the time it hits you and you try to regroup and get it together, it’s over,” explained Cathy
Acosta in 2001 as she faced eviction in West Oakland. “You’re washed out. We just found
ourselves adrift and like, ‘Where do we go?’ All of a sudden, these neighborhoods are being
cleaned up, and the residents who have had to live with the dope dealing, live through the
crack epidemic, live through the shootings are now being told, ‘Get out of here. What are
you guys still doing here?’ But we made the neighborhood safe. We struggled through all
of that, and now we have to go and do it all over again in some other crappy neighborhood
because we can’t really afford to live in our own neighborhoods anymore.”
Despite its visibility and political import, however, gentrification is a countertrend.
“Many cities are still starved for new residents and revenues. . . . The dominant trend, by far,
is movement away from central cities and towards the suburban periphery,” Kennedy and
Leonard report. But as “new corps of mayors [make] attracting middle- and upper-income
residents back to their cities a leading priority, to revitalize the tax base of their communities, the viability of their neighborhoods, and the vibrancy of their downtowns,” we can
expect it to continue. Even with the current climate of a global recession and a housing
market in crisis, gentrification does not seem to be slowing down. A Forbes Intelligent
Investing Panel discussed this very topic in June 2009:
33
forbes: As housing purchasers, we’ve been able to depend for at least two decades
on a wave of urban gentrification. Can that continue? Will the housing collapse
ruin a long-term trend that had been reviving downtown neighborhoods?
pat lashinsky, zipreality.com: Actually I don’t think so. One item that we
have seen that is becoming more important to buyers is reduced commute
times and closer-to-work locations.
michael feder, radar logic: There’s no immediate evidence that the trend
has been “ruined,” nor would one expect there to be. The real force behind
gentrification was probably more demographic growth toward the center city
than anything else, and lower-cost neighborhoods provided the space for new
development to satisfy the resultant housing demand.
Later in the discussion Lashinsky discusses the Bay Area: “Oakland is a great play right
now. There are lots of areas (like Rockridge, or Grand) of Oakland that are gentrifying very
nicely. They are getting more educated populations, nice restaurants and shops; they are
accessible to Bay Area Rapid Transit; and they are continuing a revival that started probably ten years ago. This slowdown has not affected that much at all, and there is still a lot
of upside here. Other gentrifying areas that look interesting are Berkeley and downtown
San Jose, which has seen some real strength in the last few months for our buyers.” Forbes
follows up with a question:
forbes: Pat, your offices are near Oakland, which you say is attractive as a
gentrification play, but surely you don’t live there.
lashinsky: Naw, I live in Lafayette, California, a suburban enclave, where
the school district is very strong.
34
SOURCES Francine Cavanaugh, Boom: The Sound of Eviction, DVD (San Francisco: Whispered Media, 2002); Chicago
Historical Society, “Near West Side,” “South Side,”“West Town,” “Wicker Park,” The Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org; Stephanie Fitch, “Real Estate: The End of Gentrification?” Forbes, June 3, 2009; Brian J. Godfrey,
“Urban Development and Redevelopment in San Francisco,” Geographical Review 87 (July 1997): 309–33; ibid., Neighborhoods
in Transition: The Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988); Chester Hartman, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Maureen Kennedy and Paul Leonard, “Dealing with Neighborhood Change: A Primer on Gentrification and Policy Choices,” The
Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, April 2001; ibid., “Gentrification: Practice and Politics,” LISC
Online Resource Library, July 2001; Erin McCormick, “Bayview Revitalization Comes with Huge Price to Black Residents,” San
Francisco Chronicle, January 14, 2008; Philip Nyden, Emily Edlynn, and Julie Davis, “The Differential Impact of Gentrification
on Communities in Chicago,” Loyola University Chicago Center for Urban Research and Learning, January 2006; Tim Redmond,
“A City Transformed,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 7, 1998; Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and
the Crisis of American Urbanism (London: Verso, 2000); University of Illinois at Chicago, “Gentrification in West Town: Contested
Ground,” Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, September 2001; U.S. Census Bureau,
http://www.census.gov/.
city of neighborhoods
A History of Racial Division in Chicago
by zachary moull
early immigration (1840s–1910s). Chicago in the 19th century was a city of immigrants
who tended to live in separate ethnic enclaves; Germans, Poles, and Ukrainians congregated to the northwest of the city’s center, Italians to the west, Jews and Czechs to the
southwest, and Irish to the south. Many new immigrants lived in crowded and squalid
tenement buildings, but they paid high rents due to their low social mobility.
the bungalow belt (1910–30). Developers built some 100,000 bungalows in a semicircle surrounding the downtown core and early immigrant neighborhoods, on land made
accessible by the expansion of Chicago’s elevated-rail system. These modest single-family
detached homes typically stood one-and-a-half stories tall and had small front lawns and
backyards, hardwood interiors inspired by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, and such
modern amenities as electricity, central heating, and bathrooms with running water. The
new Bungalow Belt was populated by second- and third-generation white immigrants; a
few bungalows were built for African Americans in Morgan Park on the far South Side,
but other communities kept African Americans out with zoning laws, restrictive housing
covenants, and threats of violence.
the great migration (1900–40). Chicago’s African American population grew from
20,000 in 1900 to nearly 300,000 in 1940, driven largely by migration along railroad lines
from southern states such as Louisiana and Mississippi. Those who came to Chicago fled
from increasing violence, disenfranchisement, and poverty in the rural South to seek out
new opportunities in the industrial North.
chicago’s first race riot (1919). Chicago’s growing African American population
found itself in competition with the descendants of white immigrants for jobs in Chicago’s
factories and stockyards. Blacks were increasingly common in the industrial workforce,
since they had filled the economic void created when Chicago’s steady influx of European
immigrants slowed at the start of World War i, but they were slandered as scabs and
strikebreakers by the entrenched and organized white laborers. Tensions boiled over in the
summer of 1919, when an African American boy who had swum across an unofficial racial
divide on a South Side beach was struck with stones and drowned. When the white police
officer who arrived on the scene refused to make an arrest, the city’s African Americans
marched in protest. They were met by the South Side’s white ethnic street gangs, and a
35
week of violence ensued. Police were ineffective, not least because they mostly belonged to
the same white ethnic communities as the gangs. By the time the state militia enforced a
truce, 38 people had died and hundreds more had been injured.
the black belt (1910s–50s). Chicago’s original African American neighborhood lay on
a narrow corridor along State Street on the South Side. As late as 1910, the city’s African
American population was less segregated than its Italian immigrant community. But as
racial violence became more common, blacks concentrated in the Black Belt and, to a lesser
extent, in the near West Side. The Black Belt faced a housing crisis: new arrivals flooded
the existing supply, but threats and discrimination prevented established residents from
moving to new areas. The descendants of European immigrants bought their own homes
and moved to the Bungalow Belt; the children of the Great Migration had nowhere to go.
“Kitchenette” apartments proliferated in the Black Belt as full-size apartments were illegally partitioned into two, three, or four separate units. Since demand for housing in black
neighborhoods far outstripped supply, rents in the Black Belt were higher than anywhere
else in the city—even though the apartments were smaller and in poorer condition.
bronzeville and the state street stroll (1920s–50s). Housing conditions were dire
in much of the Black Belt, described as a slum by white politicians and the media. But the
community was in fact vital and became a cultural center for African Americans akin to
Harlem in New York. Thriving commercial areas developed along State Street from 26th
to 39th (“The Stroll”) and along 47th Street east of State. This latter area was a bustling
“bright-light district” with a legendary jazz dance hall and a 3,500-seat theater. The name
“Bronzeville” was coined in 1930 by James Gentry, the theater editor of a local African
American newspaper; inspired by the color of residents’ skin, this name quickly gained
currency as a more positive moniker for the bustling community than the “Black Belt.”
36
restrictive covenants (1926–48). Legally binding contracts were signed by homeowners and landlords in white neighborhoods who agreed not to rent or sell to blacks; they
were most popular in the Bungalow Belt on the South and West Sides, where residents
were wary of the overcrowded black communities nearby. By 1939, more than half of the
city was covered by racially restrictive covenants. As private agreements between homeowners, rather than legislated segregation, they were upheld by the courts; in 1926 a judge
stated that “the constitutional right of a Negro to acquire, own, and occupy property does
not carry with it the constitutional power to compel sale and conveyance to him of any
particular private property.”
the hansberrys move to washington park (1937). Carl Hansberry, father of
playwright Lorraine Hansberry, purchased a building at 6140 S. Rhodes Avenue in
the white Washington Park area
of Woodlawn. The local community association sued to have
the Hansberrys evicted, citing
Washington Park’s restrictive
covenant. Lower courts sided
with the white residents. In 1940,
the Supreme Court finally ruled
in favor of the Hansberrys. The
court stopped short of declaring
restrictive covenants unconstituChildren, South Side of Chicago, Illinois, by Russell Lee (1941). Farm
tional, however, finding instead Security Administration, Office of War Information Photograph Collection,
that the specific Washington Library of Congress, LC-USF33- 012980-B-M3.
Park covenant was invalid due to
a technicality. Racial covenants
would remain legal for another eight years, until the courts ruled categorically against an
Englewood covenant in 1948.
second great migration (1940s–60s). Migration from the South continued in earnest
through the middle part of the century, as southern urban blacks moved north and west
to find work in wartime industries and to avoid escalating segregation and discrimination.
From 1940 to 1960, Chicago’s black population nearly tripled, from 278,000 to 813,000,
placing even greater strain on the already crowded housing market in Bronzeville.
neighborhood racial violence (1940s–60s). A siege mentality prevailed across the
South and West Sides of the city, as white residents resorted to violence to try to keep
blacks out. In 1949, two black families who had moved into Park Manor on the South
Side saw crosses burned on their lawns, and a mob of around 2,000 whites surrounded
their homes chanting, “We want fire, we want blood.” In 1951, a black bus driver rented
an apartment in a low-rise structure in a West Side suburb; some 3,500 whites gathered
in a riot that culminated in the razing of the whole building. In 1953, a black family that
moved into the far South Side saw their home bombarded with firecrackers and rocks on
a nightly basis for several weeks.
blockbusting (1950s–60s). Unethical (and often unlicensed) brokers exploited the volatile housing situation, earning exorbitant profits by deliberately engineering the sudden
shift of a neighborhood’s demographic from entirely white to entirely black. Blockbusters
“bought low” from white residents after convincing them that their neighborhood would
37
soon be “invaded” by blacks; they then “sold high” to African American families anxious
to move to a less-crowded neighborhood. The sense that predatory real estate agents were
“out to destroy neighborhoods” contributed to a climate of fear among white homeowners
and hastened their flight to the suburbs.
white flight to the outer suburbs (1950s–70s). Between 1950 and 1956 alone, nearly
300,000 white Chicagoans moved to the outer suburbs that were springing up outside the
city limits. Caused in part by racial fears, this mass exodus was also fueled by the rise of the
automobile, which had opened up vast tracts of land surrounding the rail-dependent inner
suburbs, and urban whites seized this new chance to own bigger houses in less-crowded
neighborhoods. Businesses also began to relocate to the suburbs, replacing aging inner-city
facilities with sprawling modern industrial parks and corporate headquarters.
expressways and the car culture (1950s–60s). Describing expressways as urban
renewal projects that would link the city’s core to the growing suburban region, city
planners named “slum removal” as one of the many benefits of new road construction. Construction of the 14-lane Dan Ryan Expressway destroyed the poorest area of
Bronzeville, the so-called “Federal Street Ghetto” just west of State Street. The roadway, which runs in a trench as wide as two city blocks, forms a clear boundary between
Bronzeville and white Bridgeport. Chicago’s expressway boom came at the expense of
its once-extensive streetcar system, which was completely dismantled in the ’50s to save
money and make more space on the city’s streets for suburban car traffic. This reduced the
mobility of inner-city residents, who were less likely to have cars to drive on the new roads
that bisected their communities.
38
high-rise housing projects (1950s–90s). Thousands of poor Chicagoans were displaced by expressway construction and other projects of the urban renewal movement,
which sought to reshape the urban landscape with aggressive infrastructure projects. The
city bulldozed some 50,000 housing units—home to 200,000 people—between 1950 and
1961. These people, many impoverished African Americans, were funneled into newly built
high-rise housing projects. Stateway Gardens and the Robert Taylor Homes, built along
the Dan Ryan in 1958 and 1962, respectively, covered over the heart of historic Bronzeville,
housing around 40,000 residents in rows of no-frills, near-identical apartment buildings.
Few businesses or community spaces were built to serve the new high-rises, and conditions
soon became inhospitable—all the more so once budget shortfalls prompted the Chicago
Housing Authority to reduce maintenance and cut back on criminal checks of new tenants.
Crime became a serious problem; the Near North Side Cabrini-Green high-rises earned
a nationwide reputation for gang violence when, in 1970, two police officers were killed by
a sniper firing from an apartment window.
the second ghetto (1970–present). As whites departed for the suburbs, blacks moved
into the areas surrounding Bronzeville on the South Side, and the African American
neighborhood on the city’s West Side expanded greatly. Genuine integration was rare, and
neighborhoods more often “turned over” from whites to blacks, as was the case with the
South Side neighborhood of Englewood:
demographics of englewood
1930
Black: 1%, White: 99%
1940
Black: 2%, White: 98%
1950
Black: 11%, White: 89%
1960
1970
Black: 69%, White: 31%
Black: 96%, White: 3%
After 1970, the community’s new demographics solidified; according to the 2000 census,
Englewood is 98 percent black and 0.5 percent white. The story is the same across large
portions of the South and West Sides; the color line shifted in the middle of the century,
but remained intact.
the decline of the inner city (1970s–90s). The black community’s expansion into new
neighborhoods solved the perennial problem of overcrowding, but the Second Ghetto area
declined over the ensuing decades. Residents often struggled to find work in postindustrial
Chicago, where many inner-city factories and stockyards had been closed, bulldozed for
expressways, or relocated to the distant and predominately white suburbs. At the same
time, Chicago had lost a portion of its residential and commercial tax base to the suburbs,
and the city’s government struggled to fund its school system and social programs. African
American communities faced crumbling infrastructure and police indifference, but the
quality of public schools in black neighborhoods soon stood out as the most symbolic issue.
Much of Chicago’s public school system was effectively segregated until the late 1980s, and
black schools were overcrowded and underfunded; some even ran on two half-day shifts,
unable to accommodate all their students at once. In 1987, the federal government named
Chicago’s schools the worst in the country. But protests led by black community groups
were ignored, as local politicians worried that school integration would cause another
white exodus to the suburbs; some mused ominously that “ghetto dispersal” strategies
would be preferable to such “ghetto enrichment” measures as adequate schooling.
gentrification (1990s–present). Rising gas prices and lengthy commutes have made
suburban life seem less desirable to many Chicagoans over the past two decades, and since
the 1990s suburban whites have begun to move back to the inner city. This trend coincided
39
Cabrini Profiling (demolition of the Cabrini-Green housing project), by Eric Holubow (January 2010).
www.ebow.org.
40
with a revitalization of central Chicago, particularly within the Loop, the city’s downtown
business area. Like the larger-scale urban renewal projects of the ’50s and ’60s, gentrification has displaced poor and working-class Chicagoans, driving up rents and housing prices
in neighborhoods close to downtown. Chicago’s troubled high-rise housing projects have
been largely demolished over the past decade and are being replaced by mixed-income
housing that will accommodate only a fraction of the former tenants. Several box stores
and a Whole Foods Market have sprung up near vacated Cabrini-Green, not far from
Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s performance complex, built in 1991. At the corner of
State and 35th on the South Side, a Starbucks now stands on what was once the site of
Stateway Gardens and, before that, the Stroll. Across the street is a sign advertising singlefamily homes and condo residences starting at $169,999.
SOURCES Chicago Historical Society, The Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org; William H. Frey,
“Central City White Flight: Racial and Nonracial Causes,” American Sociological Review 44.3:425–48; John C. Hudson, Chicago:
A Geography of the City and its Regions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Raymond A. Mohl, “Race and Housing in
the Postwar City: An Explosive History,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94.1:8–30; Dominic A. Pacyga, Chicago: A
Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Wendy Plotkin, “‘Hemmed In’: The Struggle Against Racial Restrictive
Covenants and Deed Restrictions in Post–World War II Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94.1:39–69;
Amanda Irene Seligman, “‘Apologies to Dracula, Werewolf, Frankenstein’: White Homeowners and Blockbusters in Postwar
Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94.1:70–95.
the way to 406 clybourne street
The Connections between Clybourne Park and A Raisin in the Sun
by dan rubin
)WASOBSESSEDWITH
orraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun
THATPLAYWHEN)WASA
follows the Younger family as they attempt to lift
KID)ESPECIALLYLIKEDTHE
themselves out of Chicago’s South Side ghetto, where
SCENEINWHICH,ENASLAPS
the five family members—Mama (Lena) Younger; her
"ENEATHA)LIKEDANYprogressive med-student daughter, Beneatha, and dissatTHINGWITHVIOLENCEINIT
isfied chauffeur son, Walter Lee; Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth,
PARTICULARLYIFITWASVIOwho works as a maid, and their young son, Travis—share
LENCEAROUNDIDEAS'OD
a small three-room apartment with a single window.
2ELIGION)FIRSTSAWTHEPLAY
When Mama receives a life insurance check for $10,000
WHEN)WASRIGHTAROUND
(the legacy of her hard-working husband), Walter Lee
THETIMETHAT)WASSTARTING
wants to invest it in a liquor store. She gives him some
TOHATEAUTHORITYSO)LOVED
of the money, but uses the rest to make a down-payment
THATSCENE%VENTHOUGH
on a sunny house with a garden in the safer, cleaner, allTHESCENEISTHEIMPOSITION
white neighborhood of Clybourne Park. Walter Lee’s
OFAUTHORITYONTO"ENEATHA
investment goes sour when a business partner absconds
STILL)REALLYLOVEDTHEPLAY
with the money, so when Karl Lindner, the chairman
)WASALWAYSREGRETFUL
of the Clybourne Park Welcoming Committee, arrives
THAT)NEVERGOTTOPLAY+ARL
to persuade the Youngers not to move, Walter Lee is
,INDNERSO)THOUGHT)LLJUST
tempted to take Lindner up on his offer to buy them
GIVEHIMSOMEMORETODO
out. But, in a final heroic show of pride—for himself,
4HATSAWAYOFGETTINGTO
his family, and his race—Walter Lee declines, and the
PLAYTHATPARTINDIRECTLY
family departs for their new home.
ˆ"RUCE.ORRISONWHYHE
Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park picks up where
CHOSETOWRITEAPLAYCONHansberry’s play leaves off—across town at 406
NECTEDTOA Raisin in the Sun
Clybourne Street, the home the Youngers have just purchased. A Raisin in the Sun ends with the moving boxes
of the Youngers, destined for Clybourne Park; Clybourne
Park begins with the moving boxes of the Stollers, destined for suburban Glen Meadow. In
Norris’s play, we see the flip side of the conversation Karl Lindner has just had with Walter
Lee’s family: he has come from that meeting, having failed to convince the Youngers not to
buy the home, in hopes of convincing the Stollers not to sell. His argument in both plays
L
41
is similar—it would be better for everyone if they all just stayed where they were supposed
to. The following exchange is from Raisin:
42
lindner: I am sure you people must be aware of some of the incidents
that have happened when colored people move into certain areas—Well—
because we have what I think is going to be a unique type of organization in
American community life—
not only do we deplore that
kind of thing—but we are
trying to do something about
it. We feel—We feel that
most of the trouble in this
world, when you come right
down to it—Most of the
trouble exists because people
just don’t sit down and talk to
each other.
ruth: You can say that again,
Mister.
The Younger family in the backyard of their new home in Clybourne Park,
lindner: That we don’t try
as portrayed in the 1961 film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun: (L to R)
hard enough to understand
Travis (Stephen Perry), Ruth (Ruby Dee), Lena/“Mama” (Claudia McNeil),
Beneatha (Diana Sands), and Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier). © Underwood &
the other fellow’s problem.
The other guy’s point of view. Underwood/CORBIS.
. . . You see our community
is made up of people who’ve worked hard as the dickens for years to build
up that little community. We’re not rich and fancy people; just hard-working
honest people who don’t really have much but those little homes and a dream
of the kind of community we want to raise our children in. Now I don’t say
we are perfect and there is a lot wrong in some of the things we want. But
you’ve got to admit that a man, right or wrong, has the right to want to have
the neighborhood he lives in a certain kind of way. And at the moment the
overwhelming majority of our people out there feel that people get along better; take more of a common interest in the life of the community when they
share a common background. Now I want you to believe me when I tell you
that race prejudice simply doesn’t enter into it. It is a matter of the people of
Clybourne Park believing, rightly or wrongly, as I say, that for the happiness
of all concerned that our Negro families are happier when they live in their
own communities.
beneatha: This, friends, is the Welcoming Committee!
Clybourne Park, the neighborhood Hansberry created, is based on Woodlawn’s
Washington Park neighborhood, where she moved as an eight-year-old with her family
in 1937, as her father, Carl, fought against Chicago real estate covenants restricting blacks
to the ghetto. The Woodlawn community did not respond well to their arrival. Mobs
demonstrated. They threw bricks and concrete slabs through the windows, nearly hitting
Lorraine. Later in life, Hansberry wrote, “I have been personally the victim of physical
attack which was the offspring of racial and political hysteria”; in addition to her own
experiences, she was a witness to the many injustices inflicted upon blacks in Chicago and
New York in the 1940s and ’50s.
So it is no surprise that A Raisin in the Sun did not always end with the hopeful new
beginning of the Youngers confidently moving on to greener pastures. The first draft of A
Raisin in the Sun concluded with the family sitting in the dark of their new home, armed,
awaiting an attack by hostile whites. Later drafts were equally explicit about the threat.
One early draft includes the following dialogue between Walter and Mama just after
Walter has rejected Lindner’s offer to buy the house:
mama: You understand what this new house done become, don’t you?
walter: Yes—I think so.
mama: We didn’t make it that—but that’s what it done become.
walter: Yes. . . .
mama: (Not looking at him) I’m proud of you my boy. (Walter is silent) ’Cause
you got to get up . . . and you got to try again. You understand. You got to
have more sense with it—and I got to be more with you—but you got to try
again. You understand?
walter: Yes, Mama. We going to be all right, Mama. You and me, I mean.
mama: (Grinning at him) Yeah—if the crackers don’t kill us all.
We do not know what happens to the Youngers after they move into 406 Clybourne
Street. History and Hansberry’s drafts suggest it was unlikely to have been an easy, or
peaceful, transition. We learn in Clybourne Park that Lindner did not stick around to find
out: his daughter, Kathy, explains in Act ii that her parents moved out of the neighborhood
just a couple of months after the Youngers moved in. We also learn from Mama’s greatniece, Lena, that the neighborhood suffered, and that African Americans struggled in
Clybourne Park much as they had in the Chicago neighborhoods from which they came.
43
art for society’s sake
The Legacy of Lorraine Hansberry and A Raisin in the Sun
by dan rubin
Her commitment of spirit . . . her creative literary ability and her profound
grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an
inspiration to generations yet unborn.
—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on Lorraine Hansberry’s death
Lorraine made no bones about asserting that art has a purpose, and that its
purpose was action: that it contained the “energy which could change things.”
—James Baldwin in “Sweet Lorraine”
I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care. Yesterday I
counted twenty-six gray hairs on the top of my head all from trying not to care.
. . . The why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the how is what
must command the living. Which is why I have lately become an insurgent
again.
—The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, by Lorraine Hansberry
iven the social climate of the late 1950s, it is little surprise that mounting the first
production of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway was a difficult affair. In pre–civil
rights movement America, this play by a female, African American playwright—a drama
dealing with serious issues about race and class, no less—came close to not happening
at all. Upon hearing the first draft read in the Greenwich Village home of playwright
Lorraine Hansberry and her husband, Robert Nemiroff, in the summer of 1957, Philip
Rose told Hansberry, “This play has to get done, and it has to get done on Broadway.”
After coming on as the play’s producer, Rose was turned down by every established source
of funding. Lloyd Richards, who would direct the play, recalled, “The smart money on
Broadway was not involved and would not be involved.”
Even after 15 arduous months, after Sidney Poitier signed on to play Walter Lee
Younger, “overwhelmed by the power of the material,” and an unheard-of 147 investors
had helped Rose raise enough money, no theater on Broadway was willing to take a
chance on the project. Theater owners assumed that “a white audience would not pay to
see a nonmusical about blacks. The possibility of black theatergoers was dismissed out
G
44
of hand. And if they did come, would white
patrons stay away—perhaps even boycott other
shows?” reported New York Times critic Michael
Anderson in a 1999 article. It was only after
two out-of-town tryouts (a four-night engagement in New Haven and two-week run in
Philadelphia) received glowing praise from
critics that Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on
Broadway. Brooks Atkinson’s New York Times
review reads,
In A Raisin in the Sun . . . Lorraine
Hansberry touches on some serious problems. No doubt, her feelings about them
are as strong as anyone’s. But she has
not tipped her play to prove one thing
or another. The play is honest. She has
Apartment House on South Side of Chicago, Illinois, by
told the inner as well as the outer truth
Russell Lee (1941). Farm Security Administration, Office
of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of
about a Negro family in the south-side of
Congress, LC-USF33-012996-M1
Chicago at the present time. . . . That is
Miss Hansberry’s personal contribution
to an explosive situation in which simple honesty is the most difficult thing in
the world. And also the most illuminating.
Raisin played for 19 months and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for
Best New Play of the Year. Hansberry was the youngest recipient of the award, and the first
playwright of color. Her play is now considered an American classic alongside the work of
O’Neill, Williams, and Miller.
A Raisin in the Sun was born out of Hansberry’s frustration with the lack of quality
drama about the African American experience. She came home from seeing a play in 1956
“disgusted with a whole body of material about Negroes” and told her husband, “I’m going
to write a social drama about Negroes that will be good art.” She took inspiration from
her own beginnings as a child on the South Side of Chicago. She was born to a politically
and socially prominent upper-middle class family in 1930; despite their status, they lived
in the only area in which African Americans were allowed to live—the ghetto. She later
remembered this period of her life:
45
I think you could find the tempo of my people on their backporches. The honesty of their living is there in the shabbiness. Scrubbed porches that sag and
look their danger. Dirty gray wood steps. And always a line of white and pink
clothes scrubbed so well, waving in the dirty wind of city.
My people are poor. And they are tired. And they are determined to live.
Our Southside is a place apart: each piece of our living is a protest.
46
In 1937, her father, Carl, a realtor active in the naacp, took the lead in the fight against
housing segregation by purchasing a home in Washington Park, a “restricted” all-white
neighborhood of Woodlawn, which, like most of Chicago, had estate covenants prohibiting selling to African Americans. Due in part to his efforts, the u.s. Supreme Court eventually deemed the covenants unconstitutional.
A Raisin in the Sun examines the struggles of three generations of African Americans
living in one small apartment as they prepare to move to the (fictional) all-white Chicago
neighborhood of Clybourne Park. They are met with opposition from the neighborhood’s
Welcoming Committee representative, Karl Lindner. Hansberry wrote in a letter to her
mother, “Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes, and life and I think it
will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are—and just
as mixed up—but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks—
people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what, after all the laughter and
tears, the play is supposed to say.”
Hansberry first came to understand the social relevance of theater while at the
University of Wisconsin in the late 1940s. She walked in on a rehearsal of Sean O’Casey’s
Juno and the Peacock, biographer Margaret B. Wilkerson writes, and “hearing in the wails
and moans of the Irish characters a universal cry of human misery, she determined to
capture that sound in the idiom of her own people—so that it could be heard by all.” Soon
after, she quit school and moved to New York City, where she became a journalist for the
progressive African American paper Freedom. She worked with Paul Robeson, who was
on the editorial board, and met such literary activists as w. e. b. Du Bois and Langston
Hughes. There she refined her writing skills—and political views.
The premiere of A Raisin in the Sun reverberated throughout the country. James
Baldwin remembers being in the backstage alley with the playwright on opening night—
after the audience erupted and demanded she take her place onstage during curtain call—
and watching Hansberry get mobbed by fans. “In Raisin, black people recognized that
house and all the people in it. . . . She was wise enough and honest enough to recognize
that black American artists are a very special case. One is not merely an artist and one
is not judged merely as an artist: the black people crowding around Lorraine, whether or
not they considered her an artist, assuredly considered her a witness.” On the 25th anniversary of the premiere, New York Times drama critic Frank Rich proclaimed that the play
had “changed American theater forever,” and as Jean Carey Bond says in her 1979 article
“Lorraine Hansberry: To Reclaim Her Legacy,” A Raisin in the Sun “prophetically embodied the Afro-American spirit that was soon to engulf the nation in a historic movement for
social change; it was also a catalyst for the emergence of a new movement in black theater.”
When producer, director, and artistic director Woodie King, Jr., decided to make a
(never-released) documentary on black theater, he wanted to start at “some point that was
identifiable to the current generation of theatergoers and theater artists,” he writes. So he
asked each of the 60 interviewees how they got started in theater. He shared the results:
What exactly do the following people/artists have in common: Lonne Elder,
Lloyd Richards, Douglas Turner Ward, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Robert Hooks,
Rosalind Cash, Ernestine McClendon, Ivan Dixon, Diana Sands, Shauneille
Perry, Ron Milner, and most of the young writers and performers who are
currently working in the American theater? The answer, without question, is
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Hence, the title of my film, The Black
Theater Movement: A Raisin in the Sun to the Present.
How to describe the effect A Raisin in the Sun had on most of us when it
opened in 1959! From my standpoint as a resident of Detroit who had only
recently become interested in theater and had no guide whatsoever, A Raisin in
the Sun opened doors within my consciousness that I never knew existed.
Over two-thirds of the interviewees said they were influenced by Hansberry. Wilkerson
argues that she heralded and was one of the major motivators of the black arts movement—the artistic branch of the black power movement, finding its expression “from hidden reserves of anger deep within the black community”—which burst onto the American
theatrical scene in the 1960s.
A civil rights activist, Hansberry spoke at rallies and writers’ conferences. With other
African American leaders, she famously met with u.s. Attorney General Robert Kennedy
to confront him about the role of the fbi in the South. Art was never just for art’s sake
in Hansberry’s world. “The writer is deceived who thinks he has some other choice,” she
writes. “The question is not whether one will make a social statement in one’s work—but
only what the statement will say, for if it says anything at all, it will be social.” Nemiroff
remembers in his foreword to her autobiography, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, “For
47
Lorraine Hansberry insurgency was a necessity, an essence of the artist. A necessity inseparable from her blackness, her womanhood, her humanism.”
Hansberry was a champion of the African American people, but she did not sentimentalize their plight. “The Negro mother really would rather have a tuberculosis-less baby—
than even the mighty Blues,” she wrote in 1961. “That is one of the secrets of our greatness
as a people. We do aim to taste the best of this green earth.” Steven R. Carter writes in
Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment amid Complexity, “For Hansberry, the first priority, always,
had to be the struggle to eliminate oppression, and it was, appropriately, to this aim that
she devoted the most care in A Raisin in the Sun.” With her writing, Hansberry fought for
not a perfect world, but a better one. Haley writes:
She envisioned a world in which good men and women face injustice boldly,
and lift their voices to combat it. Throughout her creative lifetime, she served
as a model for us all, using as her weapons her verbal articulateness and her
powerful pen. . . . Although her works were attended by protest, Lorraine
Hansberry was no utopian sentimentalist. She didn’t blindly worship one group
to indict another. Rather, in her passionate understanding, she treated all of
her characters equally. For Hansberry was not just an advocate for African
Americans, but for all of humanity, “as ridiculous as it can be,” she once said.
Hansberry believed that universality could be reached by an honest examination of the
specific—that the struggles of an African American family to move themselves out of a
ghetto in the South Side of Chicago would speak to the larger issues of the human race.
She explained in a 1961 interview,
48
I don’t think there is anything more universal in the world than man’s oppression of man. This is what most great dramas have been about, no matter what
device of telling it is. We tend to think, because it is so immediate with us in
the United States, that this is a unique human question where white people do
not like black people . . . but the fact of the matter is wherever there are men,
there are oppressed people and . . . to the extent that my work is a successful
piece of drama it makes the reality of this oppression true.
Perhaps it is for this reason that A Raisin in the Sun has found a global audience, with
translations in more than 30 languages. The play was adapted into a film in 1961, keeping
most of the original Broadway cast, and with Hansberry successfully combatting producers’ attempts to dilute the potency of her script. In 1989, it became a made-for-tv movie
starring Danny Glover and Esther Rolle. A 2008 made-for-tv adaptation featured much
of the cast of a 2004 Broadway revival. Following the end of legal segregation and the
successes of the civil rights movement, A Raisin in the Sun has lost none of its relevance.
Anna Deavere Smith wrote in the New York Times about the 2004 stage revival—for which
Phylicia Rashad, who played Mama, became the first female African American to receive
a Tony Award for Best Actress—“Sometimes repetition makes things more real, more
vibrant, more apparent.” She goes on to celebrate the obvious excitement of the audiences
that attended, noting the higher-than-average attendance of African American patrons.
When Hansberry died of cancer in 1965, at the tragically young age of 34, she left
behind more than a solitary play. She had written a total of five plays (one completed by
Nemiroff after her death) on a plethora of themes set in a variety of locales. As Carter
lists, she explored “racial conflict, colonialism, feminism, the importance of family, nuclear
holocaust, the meaning of civilization, homophobia, sexual exploitation in various guises,
abortion, socialism, and religion . . . [in] a Chicago ghetto in the 1950s, New York’s intellectual bohemia in the early 1960s, a plantation and its slave quarters in the South at the
onset of the Civil War, a postatomic wasteland, Samuel Beckett’s Godotless nowhereland,
a poor Haitian village in this century, and the Haiti of Toussaint L’Ouverture.” She also
wrote more than 60 magazine and newspaper articles, poems, and speeches. To Be Young,
Gifted and Black, based on her life, toured the country after her death, playing to thousands.
Hansberry was an important American figure not just because of these accomplishments, Wilkerson contends, but “because of her incisive, articulate, and sensitive exposure
of the dynamic, troubled American culture. That she, a black artist, could tell painful truths
to a society unaccustomed to rigorous self-criticism and still receive its praise is testimony
to her artistry.” Hansberry’s lasting legacy, more than any one work, is proof that art has
the power to illuminate, change, and create society.
Haley mused in 1979, “I feel now that, were she still among us, in her gentle and yet firm
way she would still beckon us to persist, to have faith, and to continue to work for a better
world.” Arguably, through her dramatic texts and teachings, and through the careers and
works she has influenced, Lorraine Hansberry continues to encourage us to take up her
fight against society’s injustices. If we can use art to do so, so much the better.
SOURCES Michael Anderson, “A Landmark Lesson in Being Black,” The New York Times, March 7, 1999; Jean Carey Bond,
“Lorraine Hansberry: To Reclaim Her Legacy,” Freedomways 19 (4) (1979): 183–85; Steven R. Carter, Hansberry’s Drama:
Commitment amid Complexity (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Alex Haley, “The Once and Future Vision of Lorraine
Hansberry,” Freedomways 19 (4) (1979): 277–80; Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun: 13th Anniversary Edition (London:
Samuel French, 1987); ibid., Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays (New York: Vintage Books, 1972); ibid., To Be Young, Gifted and
Black: An Informal Autobiography (New York: Signet, 1969); Woodie King, Jr., “Lorraine Hansberry’s Children: Black Artists and
A Raisin in the Sun,” Freedomways 19 (4) (1979): 219–21; Jesse McKinley, “Rashad Breaks Barrier as Leading Actress,” The
New York Times, June 7, 2003; Aishah Rahman, “To Be Black, Female and a Playwright,” Freedomways 19 (4) (1979): 256–60.
49
can we laugh yet?
A Brief History of Race and Comedy in America
by emily hoffman
W
50
hen Barack Obama
became the Democratic
nominee for president in June
2008, a hush of sorts fell over latenight comedy. The hush had not
lifted by July when the New York
Times published an article titled,
“Want Obama in a Punch Line?
First, Find a Joke,” which pointed
out the marked absence of Obama
jokes in the public comedic discourse: nothing about his age, his
eloquence, his looks, his intelli- Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the Radio Team of Amos ’n’ Andy of
gence, his family—and certainly the 1930s and 1940s. © Bettmann/CORBIS.
not his race. “Anything that has
even a whiff of being racist,” Rob Burnett, an executive producer for Late Show with David
Letterman, was quoted saying, “[and] no one is going to laugh. The audience is not going
to allow anyone to do that.” The nation held its breath for a moment as it wondered what
a new racial conversation might sound like.
Two years later and halfway through President Obama’s first term, the floodgates have
long since opened. In May 2010, Bill Maher caught flack for accusing Obama of not being
black enough when dealing with the Gulf oil crisis: “You know, this is where I want a real
black president. I want him in a meeting with the bp ceos, you know, where he lifts up his
shirt so they can see the gun in his pants? ‘We’ve got a motherf**king problem here?’ and
shoot somebody in the foot.” In October, a black comedian named James Davis released
a video parody of Atlanta rapper Waka Flocka Flame’s “Hard in Da Paint” called “Head
of the State”: the YouTube sensation features Davis as a rapping, joint-smoking Obama
(rapper name: Baracka Flacka Flames) dancing, cursing, and flaunting his power and influence at an inner-city house party. The video went viral, and though it played on similar
stereotypes as did Maher’s joke, the general consensus was that it was funnier than it was
offensive—perhaps because Davis is black while Maher is white, or perhaps simply because
Davis’s impersonation of Obama’s vocal and physical mannerisms is dead-on.
These jokes, and scores of others like them, have given the lie to the dewy-eyed promise
of a postracial America. Comedy has always been a highly revealing medium and a particularly strong barometer for issues of race: who laughs at what, and in whose company,
speaks volumes about racial boundaries and power dynamics in a given historical moment.
As Werner Sollors, a Harvard professor of African American studies and English, writes,
comic boundaries “can be rapidly created and moved, as communities of laughter arise at
the expense of some outsiders and then reshape, integrate those outsiders, and pick other
targets. If we misjudge our audience, some of the jokes we considered funny in one group
may be embarrassing or awkward in another.” Thus the disappearance of Polish jokes from
American comedy, for instance, or the contemporary ubiquity of the Arab joke, reveal the
country’s shifting racial preoccupations.
“If you look back in time,” Hispanic comedian George Lopez said in an August 2010
issue of Smithsonian magazine, “comedy was always insensitive to people of color because
our country, and comedy, was dominated by whites. That’s why Amos and Andy could
paint their faces black and make ‘black’ voices and everyone in the theater who was white
thought it was hilarious.” Amos ’n’ Andy, a hit radio show in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s and
a controversial television show in the early ’50s, is emblematic of the sort of race humor
that dominated America in the first half of the 20th century. It followed in the tradition
of minstrel shows—American variety shows popular in the pre– and post–Civil War eras
that featured either white performers in blackface or, later, black performers in blackface making a spectacle of blacks as lazy, ignorant, superstitious, simple, and buffoonish.
The original Amos and Andy of the radio show were two white men (Freeman Gosden
and Charles Correll) who performed a sort of vocal blackface—and performed in actual
blackface in the 1930 Amos ’n’ Andy film Check and Double Check. The film was not a great
success, and when the show transferred to television the producers decided to cast black
actors instead. Nick Stewart, who played Lightnin’ on the television show, recalled in a
1981 interview, “It’s funny: we had to imitate a white person imitating a black person in
order to get on [the] Amos ’n’ Andy show. You see, they taught us how to be black, how to
mispronounce words and whatnot. Who the hell needs it, you know what I’m saying?” The
naacp waged a formidable battle against cbs, who reluctantly cancelled the show in 1953,
two years after its first airing.
Just as the 1960s ushered in an era of radically shifting race relations in America, so too did
the decade mark the birth of a new sort of race comedy, signaling a transition from blatantly
racist to pointedly racial humor. If shows like Amos ’n’ Andy relied on feeding audience
51
prejudice to get their laughs, the stand-up comedians of the civil rights era relied on exposing those prejudices to get theirs. The most famous and pioneering of these comedians
was Dick Gregory, a black stand-up in the tradition of the Borscht Belt comedians ( Jack
Benny, Mort Sahl) of the ’50s and ’60s. Gregory spoke to the anxiety of the times, poking
gentle fun with serious undertones. Take the bit he did about the black power movement:
White folks in this country dirtied up the word “black,” not us. White folks
corrupted the word “power.” And one day we come through with two innocent words, “black” “power,” and everyone went crazy. Had we said, “brown
strength,” oh, everybody would have accepted that. Hell, we wouldn’t be able
to walk down the street without white folks greetin’ us, “Brown strength, my
brotha! Brown strength!” Black folks took two innocent words, “black” “power,”
and everyone went crazy.
He often mocked the empty tolerance lingo of “liberal” whites, once joking, “Personally, I
like Negroes. I like them so much, I even had them for parents.”
Gregory’s humor was political, and it was effective. It was another tool in the toolbox
of racial insurrection, along with sit-ins, marches, and freedom rides. “Humor is a weapon,
too,” Langston Hughes once wrote,
of no mean value against one’s foes. . . . Think what colored people in the
United States could do with a magazine devoted to satire and fun. . . . Since we
have not been able to moralize them out of existence with indignant editorials, maybe we could laugh them to death with well-aimed ridicule. . . . I would
like to see writers of both races write about our problems with black tongue in
white cheek or vice-versa.
52
While it was whites, mostly, who laughed at Amos ’n’ Andy, both blacks and whites
laughed at the comedy of Dick Gregory, even though it often attacked white attitudes
and behaviors. The same was true of Richard Pryor, a decidedly more caustic comic of the
’70s and ’80s, who, in the words of Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey, could “scare us into
laughing at his demons—our demons—exorcising them through mass hyperventilation.”
Laughter is a release valve, and in the context of tense race relations it can provide just the
sort of breathing room needed to wrestle with issues that would otherwise be too difficult
or uncomfortable to touch. Racial humor of the ’60s helped begin the process of cajoling
a nation into change—the difficult kind of change that cannot be legislated.
As the civil rights movement began to accomplish its goals and the racial climate of
America began to shift, the blatantly racist jokes that might have been commonplace in
the earlier part of the century became more rare in public discourse. What was said behind
closed doors, of course, is another matter entirely. Terrel H. Bell, secretary of education
under President Reagan, alleged in his 1988 book The Thirteenth Man: A Reagan Cabinet
Memoir that mid-level administrators at the White House commonly made racist jokes
when discussing issues of civil rights, going so far as to refer to The Reverend Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., as “Martin Lucifer Coon.” If this kind of joking went on in the White
House, it is hard to imagine that it didn’t also go on behind the closed doors of ordinary
citizens.
What function these sorts of jokes serve in society has been much theorized by psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers alike. Most of these theories are built on the
assumption that humans are fundamentally aggressive, and that jokes are a more acceptable
expression of that aggression than, say, physical violence. Konrad Lorenz, a German animal biologist-cum-sociologist who conducted much of his research under the rule of the
Nazi Party, argued that “laughter produces simultaneously a strong fellow-feeling among
participants and joint aggressiveness against outsiders. . . . Laughter forms a bond and
simultaneously draws a line.” Freud, equally dark in his theory of human nature, though
slightly less so in his theory of aggressive humor, argues that “humor has in it a liberating
element”—aggressive jokes allow the expression of an otherwise “censored” thought and
thus create pleasure in the joker and in the one who laughs.
If political correctness has been a major censoring agent of the last quarter century,
pushing racist jokes underground to create a veneer of tolerance, then it is precisely the
politically correct that comedians of the last decade have tried to flout at every turn. In the
hope of provoking a more honest discourse, or simply in the interest of bucking convention, comedians of all races dive headfirst into the viper’s nest of prejudice and stereotypes,
often emerging with routines dripping in venomous racism—facetious, of course. It takes
an extraordinarily fine-tuned ear to locate the source of the laughter, the heart of the joke,
inside the tangled knot of irony and referentiality in these acts. This confusion is not at all
incommensurate with America’s current racial climate, where not only comedians seem to
be asking: Where are we with this whole race thing?
Contemporary white shock comedians like Lisa Lampinelli, Gilbert Gottfried, and
Sarah Silverman often rely on racist jokes for their “Wow, she went there” credibility, as
well as for laughs. A song in Silverman’s film Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic begins, “I
love you more than bears love honey / I love you more than Jews love money / I love you
more than Asians are good at math / I love you even if it’s not hip / I love you more than
black people don’t tip / I love you more than Puerto Ricans need baths.” With Silverman
done up like a ’60s go-go girl, strumming a guitar walking around the back lot of a movie
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studio, the video clearly signals “irony” to the audience. But what exactly is being ironized?
The video’s most telling moment comes at its end: Silverman sings a lyric musing that the
phenomenon of “Jewish people driving German cars” might be like “when two black guys
call each other ‘niggers’” and promptly finds herself face to face with two black guys. The
music stops, and there is an uncomfortably long silence. Silverman, looking guilty, waits for
their judgment. Silence. Then, one of the black guys laughs, and the tension breaks. Both
black guys laugh. Silverman laughs with them, perhaps a little too loudly and comfortably,
because the black guys stop laughing before she does. She laughs a little longer, realizes
the laughter is over, and stops. Silence again. And then the last three chords of the song.
Can we laugh yet? seems to be the question Silverman and her white colleagues are
asking. Or, in other words, Is the racial playing field leveled yet? Is everything fair game?
And if it’s not, can we still joke like it is?
Dave Chappelle, a black comedian and arguably the king of contemporary race comedy,
occupies a strange middle ground between comedians like Pryor and those like Silverman,
though in many ways he exists on a plane of his own. Chappelle takes outrageous and
risky stabs at racist mythologies with sketches in which he plays, among other things, a
black and blind white supremacist, the black milkman to a 1950s white family with the
last name Nigger, and a black crackhead named Tyrone. Chappelle also plays a number of
white characters, most famously a news anchor named Chuck Taylor, whom he plays in
whiteface. Chappelle’s brand of humor relies heavily on his racially mixed audience to get
it, that is, to be laughing at the right thing. The right kind of laughter can be difficult to
pin down, not least of all because, as Freud explained in his 1905 treatise on the psychology
of humor, “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” part of what makes something funny
is precisely our inability to articulate what precisely is funny about it. “Strictly speaking,”
Freud writes, “we do not know what we are laughing about.”
The wrong kind of laughter, though, can ring out like a shot or a slap in the face: you
know it when you hear it. Chappelle heard it from a crew member on set at the beginning
of the third season of his hit program, Chappelle’s Show, and it sent the comedian packing
for an extended vacation in Africa, cancelling his million-dollar contract with Comedy
Central on the way. Chappelle is reported to have said, “It was the first time I felt that
someone was not laughing with me but laughing at me.” His widely publicized hiatus
gave his audiences a wake-up call. “You know why my show is good?” Chappelle broke
from his routine and yelled at an unruly audience in Sacramento shortly before he left for
Africa. “Because the network officials say you’re not smart enough to get what I’m doing,
and every day I fight for you. I tell them how smart you are. Turns out, I was wrong. You
people are stupid.”
Are we too stupid to mess around with racist jokes? Bruce Norris poses the same question with the tense second act of Clybourne Park. There’s also a more open-ended question
at play: what is it that racist jokes do in contemporary social interaction? The aggressive
function of racist jokes is clear enough, but there is often something more complex going
on in contemporary instances of racist joke-telling. Professor Sollors writes that “the community of laughter itself is an ethnicizing phenomenon, as we develop a sense of we-ness
laughing with others. As Freud argued . . . jokes require a social realm in which they are
told and shared.” Ethnic groups laugh at themselves, explains Sollors, and at other groups,
in ways particular to their group, and in doing so solidify their group boundaries. When
racist jokes are told in mixed company, it may be precisely these boundaries that the tellers
are trying to subvert. A white person repeating a joke he heard on Chappelle’s Show to a
black acquaintance may be trying to forge a “we-ness” that crosses racial boundaries. It’s
a risky business, though, and misjudgment can lead to grave offense. “I don’t want them
hip white people coming up to me calling me no nigger or telling me nigger jokes,” Pryor
opined at the end of his 1982 show Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip. “I don’t like it!
I’m just telling you, it’s uncomfortable to me.”
Chappelle eventually returned to comedy, though, accepting the prospect of offense and
misuse in exchange for the promise of a more open societal conversation. In 2005 he was
interviewed on Inside the Actors Studio: “America needs an honest discourse with itself,” he
mused. “I do this show . . . black people like it, white people, generations, it doesn’t matter,
because it needs to be talked about. It’s like the elephant in the living room that nobody
says anything about.” He continued:
You know, people I love tell me I went too far sometimes. Maybe I went too far.
But I did it. You know. And plus, the only way you know where the line is is to
cross it. And I think, What’s life if no one is crossing the line? You just want to
be on the right side of history and sometimes what’s going on in the immediate present is not as important as the long term. The truth is permanent, and
everything else falls by the wayside.
SOURCES Bill Carter, “Want Obama in a Punch Line? First, Find a Joke,” The New York Times, July 15, 2008; Sigmund Freud,
Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Random House, 1938); John Lowe, “Theories of Ethnic Humor: How to Enter,
Laughing,” American Quarterly 38 (3 ) (1986); Lorenza Muñoz, “George Lopez on Comedy and Race,” Smithsonian, August 2010.
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what’s in a name?
From “African” to “African American” and the Steps In Between
by beatrice basso
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged. It is the skin of a living
thought and may vary greatly in color and comment according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
The middle class is always concerned with looking good, appearing sophisticated. Being tasteful is part of what “middle class” is all about. It’s the middle
classes who are always struggling with, “What’s the new word for African
American?” or “What can I say now?”
—Bruce Norris in London’s Guardian
hen the United States was founded at the end of the 18th century, about 20 percent of the nonnative colonial population was comprised of indentured servants of
African descent, who had enjoyed equal footing with white English indenturees since the
first recorded arrival of Africans in the colonies in 1619. Those who had earned their legal
freedom, and could therefore freely define themselves (less than 8 percent of the colonial
black population in 1790), seemed to opt for “african” as their denomination, based on
the appellations of such institutions as the African Free School and the African Society
for Mutual Relief. Scholars argue whether the term was preferred because it implied the
retention of a set of cultural values, or because it conferred a specific ethnic and national
affiliation, legitimizing the presence of blacks as an identifiable immigrant group in the
new nation.
The term “African” lost its status after the American Colonization Society, a white
association with the goal of moving free blacks back to Africa, was founded in 1816. In
response, many African Americans tried to emphasize their identity as Americans in order
to establish their right to stay in the United States, where by this time they had established
lives and livelihoods. For example, the African Baptist Church of Boston, founded in 1806,
renamed itself the First Independent Church of the People of Color in the 1830s.
During the second and third decades of the 19th century, the term “colored” gained
momentum. The nation’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, professed to address “free
persons of color,” and black political gatherings were called conventions of “colored citi-
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zens.” African American journalist Samuel Cornish made a case for “colored,” arguing that
it was the only label devoid of negative connotations coming from white racists. “Colored”
remained an acceptable, even popular, term until the 1950s. According to scholar Randall
Kennedy, “The evolution of its decline is frustratingly indistinct. Perhaps its demolition
stems at least in part from the apprehension that ‘colored’ constitutes an attempted linguistic dilution of blackness, a rhetorical analogue to hair straightening, nose thinners, and
skin lighteners—signals of shame of or alienation from blackness.”
In the late-19th century, the term “negro” came into widespread use, and until the
1950s “Negro” and “colored” were equally accepted. (Karl Lindner notes in Clybourne Park:
“I say them interchangeably.”) “Negro” was used abundantly by such respected activists and
writers as w. e. b. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and playwright Lorraine Hansberry.
Yet the term always had its detractors. Its etymology—from the Latin niger, via Spanish—
literally means “black,” which had pejorative associations: darkness and blackness were
considered undesirable, even within the African American community. “Negro” also
sounded dangerously close to the pejorative “nigger.” During slavery, “slave” and “Negro”
had often been used as synonyms by whites. The primary criticism of “Negro” was that it
came from the white man, a label used to falsify the true history and identity of an entire
people. Malcolm x once said, “If Frenchmen are of France and Germans are of Germany,
where is ‘Negroland’? I’ll tell you: it’s in the mind of the white man!” Others maintained
that no specific label was responsible for the group’s oppression: “If Men despise Negroes,”
wrote Du Bois in 1928, “they will not despise them less if Negroes are called ‘colored’ or
‘Afro-Americans.’”
In the late 1960s, “black” became a substitute for “Negro,” as the civil rights and black
power movements introduced such slogans as “Black is beautiful” and “Say it loud, I’m
black and proud.” With the decade’s sweeping social and political change, “blackness”
acquired a new status, and the word became a symbol of strength and power, rather than
of oppression.
Soon a new label, promoted in 1988 by outspoken presidential candidate Jesse Jackson,
emerged: “african american.” While there is nothing inherently new in the term’s definition, the attempt was to connect with the origins and history of blacks in the United
States. Today it is considered, at least by whites, the most politically correct label available. Reactions in the black community have been somewhat mixed, however. Some were
upset that Jackson wanted to make the decision alone on behalf of an entire group. Others
argued that the term overemphasized a connection to a homeland to which they didn’t
necessarily feel a connection. And use of the term becomes complicated when considering
the rapid increase in immigration to the United States from Africa over the past 20 years.
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There are strong and divergent opinions about the charged word “nigger.” One theory
asserts that the term originated in a deliberate mispronunciation of the word “Negro” during slavery. It was already pervasively wielded by whites as an insult in the early 19th century, and its usage remained largely negative. In 1940, Langston Hughes said that it “sums
up . . . all the bitter years of insult and struggle in America.” In the 1920s, however, it was
noted that the n-word was at times employed as an endearment, and since the 1970s it has
been reappropriated by at least a portion of black Americans, quite publicly by comedians
and musicians. As Kennedy observes, within the black community the n-word can mean a
multitude of things: it can offend and indicate disapproval; it can identify without pejorative implication; it can connote a shared background; it can be a term of personal affection.
Many within the black community argue that it shouldn’t be used at all in contemporary
society, but others see it as a symbol of pride regained, a redefinition of abuse with the
awareness of paradox, a term reflective of a tragicomic sensibility. An implicit rule of the
n-word, however, is that it may not be used by white people. In that sense, it is a clear
marker of membership within (and exclusion from) a self-identified group.
Black identification and self-identification in the “postracial” United States of Barack
Obama is still one of our society’s most discussed and frustratingly elusive phenomena. The
sheer amount of thought given to this labeling is proof that there are deep unresolved feelings on the subject of race in this country. The question remains open because, while slavery
and legally sanctioned segregation have ended, there remain explicit and implicit signs of
the black-white divide. And so there continues to be a preoccupation among the oppressors and the oppressed as to which label should identify the latter group. The luxury of not
caring about the label applied to one’s group comes only after that label has been stripped
of pejorative associations, when it implies a fair chance in the game of living in America.
SOURCES Randall L. Kennedy, “Finding a Proper Name to Call Black Americans,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
46 (2004): 72–83; ibid., “Who Can Say ‘Nigger’? And Other Considerations,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 26 (1999):
86–96.
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questions to consider
1. Why do Bev and Russ decide to go through with the sale of their house?
2. As depicted in this play, how do race relations change between 1959 and 2009? How are
the conversations in the first act and second act similar? How are they different?
3. Considering the scenic design of this production, what do you think happened to 406
Clybourne Street between 1959 and 2009?
4. What dramatic purpose does Kenneth—Bev and Russ’s son—serve in Clybourne Park?
5. What arguments does this play make about gentrification? What signs of gentrification
have you witnessed in the Bay Area and other cities? How has gentrification affected your life?
6. Did you laugh at the jokes told in the second act? If so, why? Do you know any offensive
jokes? What makes them offensive? Where are you comfortable telling them? Where did
you first hear them?
for further information . . .
Boyd, Michelle R. Jim Crow Nostalgia: Reconstructing Race in Bronzeville. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. London: Samuel French, 1959.
Hartman, Chester. City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985.
Norris, Bruce. Clybourne Park. Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, 2010.
———. Purple Heart and The Infidel: Two Plays. Evanston, il: Northwestern University
Press, 2005.
———. The Pain and the Itch. Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, 2008.
———. The Unmentionables. Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, 2009.
Pattillo, Mary E. Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Satter, Beryl. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban
America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.
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Set elevation for Clybourne Park by scenic designer Ralph Funicello