For the Love of Culture: Diaspora Identity from Africa to America He seeks to rebuild Nigeria by building a global Black commerce as Garvey hoped to do. Asagai acknowledges the effects of colonization. His home country, Nigeria, did not establish independence from British rule until 1960. Premiering in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun embraces the tensions that Africans in America faced in a quest for their home countries’ independence while living abroad. But all Black Americans did not understand or embrace Pan-Africanism. A Raisin in the Sun takes place at a time when segregation laws were still in effect. The Civil Rights Movement in the United States was building momentum even as independence movements bubbled up for African countries. Globally, African descendants still faced discrimination and lived under oppressive colonial leadership. In the play, George Murchison is more concerned with getting “a degree,” not seeing the benefit of espousing his African heritage. He is dismissive of Pan-Africanism because he believes African culture is nothing more than meaningless songs and poor housing infrastructure. Of course, African culture is much more than this, but these prejudices among diasporic people are the ironic byproducts of colonization. George is much more comfortable with assimilation as a Black American because his access to an upper-class lifestyle shields him from some of the everyday ills of discrimination. Beneatha’s choice at the end of the play may surprise you, but her relationship with both men highlights the intimate and complex relationship with identity shared by many Black Americans during the 1950s. Pan-Africanism is rooted in love—love of country, love of identity, love of culture. It’s no coincidence that Hansberry uses a romantic relationship to connect these themes. —ASHLEY M. THOMAS
Pan-Africanism Today Today, Pan-Africanism takes shape in multiple ways and is more widely embedded throughout the African diaspora, especially throughout pop culture. From Nigerian American artist Jidenna’s 85 to Africa to Marvel’s Black Panther, Pan-Africanism is a still a proud global movement for the African diaspora that seeks to unite the ever-changing culture of African descendants. Beyoncé herself calls her new musical release, The Lion King: The Gift, a “love letter to Africa” while Ghana celebrated its second “Afrochella” festival in December—a Pan-African music and arts festival similar to Coachella that uplifts cultural solidarity across the African diaspora. Pan Africanism is a celebration of culture and politics.
14 15
How Housing Discrimina Hansberr y v. Lee
My father was typical of a generation of Negroes who believed that the “American way” could successfully be made to work to democratize the United States. Thus, twenty-five years ago, he 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 that our family occupy the disputed property in a hellishly hostile “white neighborhood” in which, literally, howling mobs surrounded our house. One of their missiles almost took the life of the then eightyear-old signer of this letter. My memories of this “correct” way of fighting white supremacy in America included 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 house all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court. The fact that my father and the NAACP “won” a Supreme Court decision, in a now famous case which bears his name in the law books, is— ironically—the sort of “progress” our satisfied friends allude to when they presume to deride the more radical means of struggle. The cost, in emotional turmoil, time and money, which led to my father’s early death as a permanently embittered exile in a foreign country when he saw that after such sacrificial efforts the Negroes of Chicago were as ghetto-locked as ever, does not seem to figure in their calculations. —Lorraine Hansberry, Letter to the Editor of The New York Times, April 23, 1964
