Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

The book scheduled for our August 17 th discussion is Dreamer by Charles Johnson. It takes place in Chicago during the summer of 1966 and Dr. Martin Luther King is staying in a disgusting tenement apartment to underlie the argument for affordable decent housing. Riots are going on all around and Dr. King is questioning as to whether his position of non-violence will work in a northern city. The parts of the book that are in italics are the inner thoughts of Dr. King, the pages in plain type is the story. The narrator is Matthew Bishop, a college dropout who joined the Movement as a record-keeper/note-taker, who says about himself: “I knew I left no lasting impression people who met me once (and often two and three times). Most never remembered my name, I had no outstanding features, no “best side,” as they say, to hold in profile…a shy, bookish man who went to great lengths not to call unnecessary attention to himself…I was nobody.” Our discussion wasn’t well attended at...

Book Cover: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry  Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry  by Imani Perry Imani Perry being interviewed for PBS November 2018 1        Lorraine Hansberry was the first African American female author to have a play produced on Broadway. Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was also staged on Broadway, but had a much shorter run. 2        The title of her play:   A Raisin in the Sun is taken from a Langston Hughes poem with the line:            “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”        Lorraine’s own family had moved into a white neighborhood in Chicago. The neighborhood had a “restrictive covenant.” Ta Nehesi Coates discussed these covenants in the book We Were Eight Years in Power. White ...