Author Anthony Barthelemy discusses the political nature of The River Niger regarding its representations of women and men and their interracial and intersexual struggles.

Perhaps no single work by a black American playwright has reached so vast an audience as Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. A success on Broadway in 1959, the play enjoys frequent revivals by professional and amateur theater groups alike. It remains in print twenty-five years later, and the 1960 movie version appears regularly on our televisions. Unknown to this immense audience is the fact that A Raisin in the Sun responds to an earlier play by black playwright Theodore Ward and constitutes the middle third of a larger literary debate—a debate that began in 1938 when Ward's play Big White Fog opened in Chicago under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project. Playwright Joseph Walker contributed the final third in 1973 when he...