Struggling Dreams Essay -- essays research papers

  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Several poems attempt to address social and political issues. In several of Langston Hughes’s poems, he expresses sociopolitical protests. He portrayed people whose lives were impacted by racism and sexual conflicts, he wrote about southern violence, Harlem street life, poverty, prejudice, hunger, hopelessness. Hughes’s poem a â€Å"Dream Deferred† was published in 1951. The poem speculated about the consequences of white’s society’s withholding of equal opportunity. The title of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raison in the Sun was taken directly from Hughes’s poem. Hansberry’s parents were intellectuals and activists, and her father won an antisegregation case before the Illinois Supreme Court, upon which the events in A Raison in the Sun were loosely based. â€Å"Dream Deferred† is applied to several of the characters in Hansberry’s play.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã¢â‚¬Å"Dream Deferred† was written during the Harlem Renaissance between the 1920s and 40s, after World War I. It was a time when African Americans began an intellectual movement. Harlem became the center of African American culture. Most African Americans began a movement to rethink their values and appreciation of their roots and Africa. Beneatha was a prime example of this from the play. She is very intellectually proud with everyone she comes into contact with; even her family. Her name Beneatha alone connotes the idea that everyone is â€Å"beneath† her. For instance, when she speaks to her moth...