wop_clybournepark

8/3/2019 WoP_ClybournePark

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WORDS ON PLAYS prepared by

elizabeth brodersen publications editor

dan rubin publications & literary associate

michael paller resident dramaturg

beatrice basso production dramaturg

emily hoffman

publications fellowzachary moull dramaturgy fellow

made possible by

by bruce norris

directed by jonathan moscone

american conservatory theater

january 20–february 13, 2011

C lybourne P ark

A M ER I C A N C O N S ER V A T O R Y T H EA T ER

Carey Perloff, Artistic Director • Ellen Richard, Executive Director

P R E S E N T S

© 2011 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.



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 Norrisby Beatrice Basso

13. Aging 50 Years in 15Minutes: 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 Gentrification by Pierre LaScott



Preliminary wall elevations for Clybourne Park by scenic designer Ralph Funicello



1

characters, cast, and synopsis ofCLYBOURNE 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 castact i (1959) act ii (2009)

russ dan Anthony Fusco

bev, married to Russ kathy René Augesen

francine lena Omozé Idehenre

jim tom/kenneth Manoel Felciano

albert, married to Francine kevin, married to Lena Gregory Wallace

karl lindner steve Richard Thieriot

betsy, married to Karl lindsey, married to Steve Emily Kitchens

settingA three-bedroom home in the near northwest of central Chicago.

synopsis

Act 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 uncom-

fortable 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 con-cern that the Stollers have sold their house to an African American couple. Because the



2

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 conversa-

tion 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 com-

munity, 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.

Act 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 neigh-

borhood 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 theproperty. 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 “his-

torically 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 tak-

ing 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 hergreat-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.



3

the freedom to provoke An Interview with Playwright Bruce Norris

by beatrice basso (with an introduction by dan rubin)

Since making his 1992 playwrit-

ing 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 dan-

gerous is happening,” he recently

told London’s Evening Standard

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 fromNorthwestern 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–9/11paranoia in a suburban home. A

self-professed liberal and well-balanced couple must deal with inexplicably half-gnawed

Clybourne Park playwright Bruce Norris (left) with director Jonathan

Moscone on the first day of rehearsal at A.C.T.



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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 casu-

ally 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 in2007 after The Pain

and the Itch opened at the Royal Court Theatre. “I just have a whole bunch of psychologi-

cal 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. Atleast 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 overanother, 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 reso-

nated 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 (1959in 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



5

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 thanin 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 arehigher, 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 uncomfort-

able 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 racehere 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.



6

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 oppres-

sors) sit around going, “Is it time now? Has enough time elapsed? Can we now say ‘nig-

ger’?” 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 refusesto 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 cer-

tain 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.

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.



7

we assign worth to certain values that we think identify us as

belonging to a particular category of people, like a certain stan-

dard 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.



9

very close to where Cabrini-Green used to be. Cabrini-Green was a big, dangerous hous-

ing 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 about15 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 20years. 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’thave 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-



10

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 pre-

miered 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 mod-

ern 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 thesecond 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 talk-

ing 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 embar-rassed 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.

having seen three productions of this play, do you find each verydifferent 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



11

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 isno 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 thesedays—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



12

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 unforgiv-

ing 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 play-

writing 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.

secret ideas?Roughly speaking, I’m hoping to write about three things: sex, evolution, and economics.



13

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 begin-

ning 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 politi-cal—of designing Clybourne Park.

Photo of the set model for Clybourne Park by scenic designer Ralph Funicello



14

let’s jump right in: what does this house look like? since CLYBOURNE

PARK 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.

what do the chicago bungalows look like? They’re primarily brick Craftsman houses that have a lot of oak. When they were origi-

nally 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 asubdivision 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.

Bungalow-style homes in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood (2008). Photo by Samuel A. Love.



15

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 audi-

ence, 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 someindications, but you have to backtrack and ask, “What happened to this house?” We know

the family from [Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959play] 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 ishave 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 even-

tually it was shuttered up and then broken into or squatted in. Maybe it was a crack house.

Some awful, awful things happened to it.



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 direc-

tions], 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-room-

looking wood paneling. What that is now called, believe it or not, is “porno paneling.” I

guess in the ’70

s 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 bed-

room. 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 youcan make it pretty nasty underneath and then get rid of the drapes at intermission. There’s

Paint elevations for the “porno paneling” in Clybourne Park by scenic designer Ralph Funicello



17

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 goingin 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 15minutes.

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 fall-

ing apart likely to make them side with steve and lindsey rather

than with ke vin and lena, who don’t want to see m ajor 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.



18

Another one we did at a.c.t. was Charles Randolph-Wright’s production of [the 16th-

century 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

1960and 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 car-

pet. 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 yourmoney, 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 signifyCostume Designer Katherine Roth on Clybourne Park

W 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 thefirst 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



19

said, “You know, actually I think she wore her own clothes and a smock.” So it was start-

ing 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 wedo 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 audi-

ence 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 notbe, “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.



20

what is gentrification?

by dan rubin

F or some residents of lower- or working-

class neighborhoods, gentrification means

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 theircommunity. 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 improve-ment, 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 pur-

posefully disinvesting and then reinvesting in a particular neighborhood in order to turn a

profit. For many, gentrification is synonymous with displacement, specifically the displace-

ment 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 lodg-

ing houses or were otherwise in multiple occupation—have been upgraded

gen·try n. People of gentle birth, good

breeding, or high social position.



21

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 com-

parison 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 neighbor-

hood’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 the20

th century. Between the1940

s and the1960

s,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 lead-

ers 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.”

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.



22

To combat these problems, some city governments established commissions charged

with the revitalization of such areas. San Francisco, for example, has reinvested $50million

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 4,729households and razed 2,500Victorian homes, leaving

properties vacant for years. Over 800 local businesses closed. “They wiped out our commu-

nity, 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 fromurban 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 andrenovated 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-themtensions are common in gentrifying neighborhoods, as the current residents feel their

values undermined by the lifestyle choices of outsiders. Many are skeptical about improve-

ments 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



23

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 con-

ducted in four gentrifying Chicago

communities in 2006.

These feelings are especially prev-

alent with respect to the construc-

tion of new housing, the most visible

mark of the onset of gentrification. The

Loyola study explains that “the physicalappearance of new development is seen

as being insensitive to the visual char-

acter of the existing community. New

houses are described as ‘cookie-cutter’

houses that threaten the distinctive-

ness of the community.” In part, this

disconnect exists because developers are

not creating new housing for the cur-rent population, but for the next wave

of wealthier residents. In Chicago’s

West Town area—the closest real-

world 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 istaking the form of either an immediate

purchase/teardown/new construction

process, or conversion of existing prop-

erties 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.

The 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 segre-

gated 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 concen-

trated ethnic enclaves.”

—“Census Data Show

‘Surprising’ Segregation,”

USA Today , December 14, 2010



24

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 inte-

gration 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, whilegentrification may put a strain on some lower- and working-class families, “poor house-

holds are more likely to exit poverty themselves than to be replaced by a nonpoor house-

hold.” 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 vacantresidencies 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 edu-

cational achievement.

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).



25

chicago: demographics

ILLINOIS

Majority White

Majority Hispanic

Majority Black

Majority Asian

No Majority

Adapted from Bill Rankin’s 2009 map on his Radical Cartography website, http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots



26

chicago: selected neighborhoods

Lake Michigan

Loop

LincolnPark

Near South Side

Near North Side

Douglas (Bronzeville)

Oakland

Kenwood

Hyde Park

Woodlawn

South Shore

South Side

Bridge-

port

Engle-

wood

West Side

Near

West

Side

West Town



27

race and the cityGentrification in Chicago and San Francisco

by dan rubin

chicago

Issues 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, thesebrokers 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 6140S. 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 300,000as 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 popula-

tion declined from a high of 81,279in 1960to 27,086in 2000.” After decades of disinvest-

ment, 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 histori-

cally 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 neigh-borhoods examined in the case studies, minority households (African American as well as



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 2006by 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 cul-tural 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 becausethe 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, andUkrainians. 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 man-

sions 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



29

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 insur-

ance 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 specu-

lators acquired properties for cheap. With the backing of these investors, the redevelop-

ment 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 gentri-

fication 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. Lower-

income residents of West Town have moved to areas further north and west to

escape the area’s rising real-estate values.

Between 1990and 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



30

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

San Francisco is much like Chicago’s West Town: it’s full. In its 1998anniversary issue, the

San Francisco Bay Guardian printed “The Economic Cleansing of San Francisco,” whichreported that gentrification was responsible for the loss of more than 1,000 low-cost hous-

ing 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 remem-

bers, “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 devel-opers 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 labor-

ers in the mid-20th century, the district was a concentration of single men and working-

class 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-square-

foot 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-



31

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 com-

ment 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, gentrifica-

tion creates noticeable changes in neighborhood character in a matter of months,” wrote

Kennedy and Leonard before the 2008recession 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 31,000new 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 immigra-

tion 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 neighbor-

hood becoming a bedroom community for Silicon Valley, 50miles 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 andbad—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 plat-

form of antigentrification in Bayview –Hunters Point, at the southeast edge of the city lim-

its, along the bay: “I have entered this race to combat destructive social engineering policies,



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, whenthey 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 13percent 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 for-

mer 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.

Gentrification Is Predatory Development , by Favianna Rodriguez (2006). favianna.com.



33

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 posi-

tive: “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 com-

munity. “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 communi-

ties, 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:



34

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 prob-

ably 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.

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://encyclo-

pedia.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/.



35

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 congre-

gated 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 100,000bungalows in a semi-

circle surrounding the downtown core and early immigrant neighborhoods, on land madeaccessible 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’sfactories 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



36

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 ona 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 ille-gally 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 47 th 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 1930by 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.”

restrictive covenants (1926– 48). Legally binding contracts were signed by homeown-

ers 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 home-

owners, 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



38

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 construc-

tion. 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 road-

way, 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 savemoney 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.

high-rise housing projects (1950s–90s). Thousands of poor Chicagoans were dis-

placed 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 builthigh-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 40,000residents 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



39

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 Americanneighborhood 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% 1960 Black: 69%, White: 31%

1940 Black: 2%, White: 98% 1970 Black: 96%, White: 3%

1950 Black: 11%, White: 89%

After 1970, the community’s new demographics solidified; according to the 2000 census,

Englewood is 98percent 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 postindustrialChicago, 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



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, gentrifica-

tion 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 single-

family 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.

Cabrini Profiling (demolition of the Cabrini-Green housing project), by Eric Holubow (January 2010).

www.ebow.org.



41

the way to 406 clybourne street The Connections between Clybourne Park and A Raisin in the Sun

by dan rubin

Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun

follows the Younger family as they attempt to lift

themselves out of Chicago’s South Side ghetto, where

the five family members—Mama (Lena) Younger; her

progressive med-student daughter, Beneatha, and dissat-

isfied chauffeur son, Walter Lee; Walter Lee’s wife, Ruth,

who works as a maid, and their young son, Travis—sharea small three-room apartment with a single window.

When Mama receives a life insurance check for $10,000

(the legacy of her hard-working husband), Walter Lee

wants to invest it in a liquor store. She gives him some

of the money, but uses the rest to make a down-payment

on a sunny house with a garden in the safer, cleaner, all-

white neighborhood of Clybourne Park. Walter Lee’s

investment goes sour when a business partner absconds with the money, so when Karl Lindner, the chairman

of the Clybourne Park Welcoming Committee, arrives

to persuade the Youngers not to move, Walter Lee is

tempted to take Lindner up on his offer to buy them

out. But, in a final heroic show of pride—for himself,

his family, and his race—Walter Lee declines, and the

family departs for their new home.

Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park picks up where

Hansberry’s play leaves off—across town at 406

Clybourne Street, the home the Youngers have just pur-

chased. 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

I was obsessed with

that play when I was a

kid. I especially liked the

scene in which Lena slaps

Beneatha. I liked any-

thing with violence in it,

particularly if it was vio-

lence around ideas. God.

Religion. I first saw the play

when I was 12, right around

the time that I was starting

to hate authority, so I loved

that scene. Even though

the scene is the imposition

of authority onto Beneatha,

still I really loved the play.

I was always regretful

that I never got to play Karl

Lindner, so I thought I’ll just

give him some more to do.

That’s a way of getting to

play that part indirectly.

—Bruce Norris, on why he

chose to write a play con-

nected to A Raisin in the Sun



42

is similar—it would be better for everyone if they all just stayed where they were supposed

to. The following exchange is from Raisin:

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.

lindner: That we don’t try

hard enough to understand

the other fellow’s problem.

The other guy’s point of view.

. . . 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 bet-

ter; 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

The Younger family in the backyard of their new home in Clybourne Park,

as portrayed in the 1961 film adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun : (L to R)Travis (Stephen Perry), Ruth (Ruby Dee), Lena/“Mama” (Claudia McNeil),

Beneatha (Diana Sands), and Walter Lee (Sidney Poitier). © Underwood &

Underwood/CORBIS.



43

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 great-

niece, Lena, that the neighborhood suffered, and that African Americans struggled inClybourne Park much as they had in the Chicago neighborhoods from which they came.



44

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

Given 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



45

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 engage-

ment 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 . . . LorraineHansberry touches on some serious prob-

lems. 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

told the inner as well as the outer truth

about a Negro family in the south-side of

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:

Apartment House on South Side of Chicago, Illinois , by

Russell Lee (1941). Farm Security Administration, Office

of War Information Photograph Collection, Library of

Congress, LC-USF33-012996-M1.



46

I think you could find the tempo of my people on their backporches. The hon-

esty 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.

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 prohibit-

ing selling to African Americans. Due in part to his efforts, the u.s. Supreme Court even-

tually 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 wason 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



47

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 anni-

versary 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 embod-

ied 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 move-

ment—the artistic branch of the black power movement, finding its expression “from hid-

den 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



48

Lorraine Hansberry insurgency was a necessity, an essence of the artist. A necessity insepa-

rable from her blackness, her womanhood, her humanism.”

Hansberry was a champion of the African American people, but she did not sentimen-

talize 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 thespecific—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,

I don’t think there is anything more universal in the world than man’s oppres-

sion 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 donot 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 30languages. The play was adapted into a film in 1961, keeping

most of the original Broadway cast, and with Hansberry successfully combatting produc-

ers’ 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



49

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 receivea 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 intel-

lectual 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 accomplish-

ments, Wilkerson contends, but “because of her incisive, articulate, and sensitive exposureof 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.



50

can we laugh yet? A Brief History of Race and Comedy in America

by emily hoffman

W hen Barack Obama

became the Democratic

nominee for president in June

2008, a hush of sorts fell over late-

night 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 dis-

course: nothing about his age, his

eloquence, his looks, his intelli-

gence, his family—and certainly

not his race. “Anything that haseven 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 influ-

ence 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

Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the Radio Team of Amos ’n’ Andy of

the 1930s and 1940s . © Bettmann/CORBIS.



51

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 par-

ticularly 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 thecountry’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 traditionof 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 black-

face 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 a1981interview, “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



52

prejudice to get their laughs, the stand-up comedians of the civil rights era relied on expos-

ing 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 inno-

cent 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 editori-

als, 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.

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



53

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 psy-

chologists, 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 ani-mal 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 conven-

tion, 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 tobe 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



54

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 packingfor 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.”



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Are we too stupid to mess around with racist jokes? Bruce Norris poses the same ques-

tion 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 com-

munity 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’sa 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 immedi-

ate present is not as important as the long term. The truth is permanent, andeverything 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.



56

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 circum-

stances and the time in which it is used.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

The middle class is always concerned with looking good, appearing sophisti-

cated. Being tasteful is part of what “middle class” is all about. It’s the middleclasses 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

W hen the United States was founded at the end of the 18th century, about 20 per-

cent 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 legalfreedom, 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-



57

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 lin-

guistic 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 defi-

nition, 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 avail-

able. 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.



58

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” dur-

ing slavery. It was already pervasively wielded by whites as an insult in the early 19th cen-

tury, 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 pejora-

tive 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 theawareness 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 feel-

ings 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 oppres-

sors 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.



59

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 1959and 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

wop_clybournepark

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