Celebrate our victories while the struggle continues
I've avoided A Raisin in the Sun like the plague because I thought it would be like the TV show, Good Times that depressed me because the family seemingly never got a break. And the title being a line from Langston Huges' A Dream Deferred did not fill me with glee.
Anyway, I'm in the hospital waiting room waiting to see my dad, when A Raisin in the Sun shows up on TCM. I'm like, Gawd, this is all I need now! But I was so wrong. The play went straight to the heart of Digital Puppy's encouragement to celebrate our victories while the struggle continues, a message that resounds in my heart.
Unfortunately I couldn't find the clips I wanted. But these are the scenes where the real estate/new neighbor guy meets with the family at 1:15:23, and to me the moment of triumph 1:43:13
I couldn't imagine a better ending. Got home and Googled the play to find that Lorraine Hansburry wrote of her family's experience!
"Lorraine reflects upon the litigation in her book To Be Young, Gifted, and Black:
25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation's ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger (pistol), doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.
The Hansberry house, the red-brick three-flat at 6140 S. Rhodes in Washington Park that they bought in 1937, was given landmark status by the Chicago City Council's Committee on Historical Landmarks Preservation in 2010."
Googled Good Times, too, and found there's a full length movie in the works. Looking forward to hearing about the treatment of this film. http://deadline.com/2015/04/kenya-barris-good-times-blackish-sony-pictures-feature-1201416790/
Imagery is everything, nothing is shutting us up about changing the narrative as we celebrate victories and press on.
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I am so glad that you got so much out of the film at this particularly dark time in your life. 
And not only did you create this sweet OP, you gave me the news about a Good Times movie in the works!
True story: I was never allowed to watch Good Times when I was a kid. My mother, former Black Panther extraordinaire, said she'd never let a "white man" (the creator of the show) define what blackness was for her baby. To this day, I have only seen snippets of it.
Your Mom skated right past it's good to see AA represented on TV to so what, it's not uplifting. Brava!
We were still relatively new here and the show basically reflected our living condition at the time. I remember my family was heartbroken when they killed the dad off. Why would they do that I remember asking, since every one of the black families in our vacinity had a hardworking dad, and only the rare sad case of death or divorce removing the dad from the home. It was like a real mourning becuase we stopped watching after that.
I just had a flash of the opening shot that does not seem like NYC to me. Google, my friend, just told me the setting is Chicago, the home of the infamous Cabrini-Green projects and landmark Hansberry home. My conspiracy mind is at it again, making strange connections 
The movie is certainly to start a lot of discussion. So much to dismantle and to celebrate. Our treatment in this country is food for discussion and analysis forever more 
And come back and give us all a full report.
I'd love to give that report
