Racial Conflict in 3 Plays by Lorraine Hansberry

However, Hansberry is an optimist, not a revolutionary. Her work leans toward the reassuring rather than the disturbing. Her characters, for the most part, live in a world which still contains the salvation and healing that love and personal development can bring, even in the face of racial and other obstacles.

This is not to say that there is not an edge to her plays, a sense of anger and warning, for there certainly is. Hansberry in A Raisin in the Sun, for example, clearly means to give the message that the racial injustices heaped on blacks will result in increased social turbulence if those injustices are not addressed and corrected.

However, in no way can Hansberry be considered a radical in her artistic, economic, political or social expression. She believes in the American Dream, both its promise and its potentially corrupting influence. Her plays are a plea to whites to be more just and to blacks to be more courageous in pursuing goals worthy of their good and strong spirits. She sees not only the racism

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ice, and neither finally does this black family. They are determined to make a better life for themselves as proud blacks together, but there still remains much struggle ahead of them. What Use Are Flowers? is a far less effective play than A Raisin in the Sun and does not deal directly with racial conflict at all. The play is a naive attempt to encourage people to love one another and to work together to improve their general lot. In that sense, at least, it can be seen as a warning against conflict of any kind---racial or otherwise---which threatens to divide people against one another in violence and finally destroy the entire race. The simplistic message of the play is that we should love and work together, and it cannot be faulted for its good intentions, However, it is difficult to imagine the author's believing that it could have much of an impact on improving racial relations in this country, if that is what she intends. It is best seen as a play for children, so that perhaps there is hope after all that the younger generation can be reached where the older cannot. In any case, again, the play is not particularly useful in terms of its shedding direct light on racial conflict or on Hansberry's views on racial conflict.
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Approximate Word count = 3198
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)