MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY.

I don't see how anyone can be exposed to Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin the Sun and still be a racist. When this play opened on Broadway in 1959, I was 17. My first awareness of it was on a Sunday morning TV show called Camera 3. Living in a white world, I was stunned by the differences and similarities of the Younger family to the white families I have known. They faced the same struggles, the same dreams, the same conflicts as everyone else.  Having grown up in Roxbury, Massachusetts, a racially mixed suburb of Boston, I was aware of blacks but had never been in their homes. I say homes, but they would have been low-rent apartments that my Italian, German, and Irish heritage neighbors could afford. I was so impressed with the one scene I saw, I went to New York the following year and saw the play. This was one of the great theater moments of my life, though I did not see the original cast member Sidney Poitier as Walter Younger, but the very talented Ossie Davis. Also in the play was Ossie's wife Ruby Dee, Diane Sands, John Fiedler  and the incomparable Claudia McNeil. Though the play closed in 1960, it was soon made into a brilliant movie with the original cast, including Sidney Poitier in, what I consider, his greatest performance. So if you harbor any racist feelings, or feel superior to your black brothers, or feel they don't have the same needs, frustrations and ambitions you do, please watch the 1961 Daniel Petrie-directed film Raisin in the Sun. It's 128 minutes that might change your life.