They need more salvation from the British and the French Beneatha says this to Mama as she attempts to "educate" her mother to what Beneatha feels are political realities. She knows that Mama believes in giving money to her church for the missionary work, but the Africans, she says, "need more salvation from the British and the French," who were the dominant colonial rulers at that time.
Thirty pieces and not a coin less Thirty pieces of silver was the standard price of a slave (Exodus 21:32). Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus Christ for the same amount of money (30 pieces of silver) normally paid for a slave. Beneatha taunts Lindner with this allusion when he makes his generous offer to keep the Younger family out of the neighborhood.
We've all got acute ghetto-itis Beneatha says this when Asagai drops by to visit, immediately after the Younger family has had a depressing conversation about their financial station in life and Ruth's possible pregnancy. Beneatha refers to the "ghetto" in which they live as though it brings with it a disease that she calls "ghetto-iris."
You done wrote his epitaph too Mama says this to Beneatha when Beneatha speaks so harshly against Walter Lee upon learnlng that he lost the family's remaining money. Beneatha is so relentlessly unforgiving toward Walter Lee that Mama is forced to defend him. She makes Beneatha consider this question: who is Beneatha to write his epitaph — to write him off as though he no longer exists just because she is so angry at him?
You don't have to ride to work on the back of nobody's streetcar Prior to the civil rights movement, which reached its peak in the sixties, segregated facilities, separating whites from blacks, were common in the south, where "Jim Crow" laws made it legal. (Even in the northern cities, vestiges of segregation were apparent.) In the south, whites rode in the front of buses, blacks in the back. An interesting aspect of this particular "Jim Crow" law was that a black person might be permitted to sit in the front of the bus if there were no white person on the bus who needed that seat. If a white person boarded the bus and a black person was seated in the front, the black person knew, almost instinctively, that he had to get up in deference to the white person who needed that seat. During the thirties and forties, the mass exodus of blacks from the south to the northern cities was an attempt to flee segregation injustices, including being forced to ride at the back of buses. Not until Rosa Parks dramatically refused to sit at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954, an act which accelerated the civil rights movement, did most blacks in the south even think about the absurdity of the "Jim Crow" laws. Mama's generation worked hard so that their children could have a "better life," which, to her, meant a life without segregation. To those of Mama's generation, it should have been enough that Walter Lee's generation can ride at the front of a bus. Mama cannot understand why Walter Lee wants more from life than to sit anywhere he wants on public transportation. Walter, in contrast, and others of his generation, take that particular "freedom" for granted. Walter wants the larger freedom of being totally independent of everyone; he wants to be able to earn his living without having a "boss"; more important, he wants to be able to generate his own income without being dependent on a salary as a chauffeur. In short, Walter is questioning the reasons he cannot live the way his bosses live. When he asks why his wife cannot wear pearls, he is asking why he has to resign himself to poverty, being ever grateful that he no longer has to ride at the back of a bus. To Mama, that particular measure of equality is enough; to Walter, it is an outrage.
