Lorraine Hansberry, 1930-1965
American playwright and painter, whose A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first
drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. It also won the New York Drama
Critic’s Circle Award as the best play of the year. Hansberry portrays individuals – not
only black – who defend their own and other’s dignity. “All art is ultimately social: that
which agitates and that which prepares the mind for slumber,” she once said.
“…in order for a person to bear his life, he needs a valid re-creation of that life, which is why, as Ray
Charles might put it, blacks chose to sing the blues. This is why Raisin in the Sun meant so much to
black people – on the stage: the film is another matter. In the theatre, a current flowed back and
forth between the audience and the actors, flesh and blood corroborating flesh and blood – as we say,
testifying…The root argument of the play is really far more subtle than either its detractors or the bulk
of its admirers were able to see.” (James Baldwin, 1976)
Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago as the daughter of a
prominent real-estate broker, Carl Hansberry, and the niece of William Leo
Hansberry (1894-1965), a Howard University professor of African History in
D.C. William Leo Hansberry taught at Howard University until 1959 after
rejecting employment offers from Atlanta University and the Honorable
Marcus Garvey. A college at the University of Nigeria was named in his
honor. Hansberry’s parents were intellectuals and activists. Her father
was an active member of the Republican Party. He won an antisegregation
case before the Illinois Supreme Court, upon which the events in A Raisin
in the Sun was loosely based. When Lorraine was eight, her parents
bought a house in a white neighbourhood, where they were welcomed
one night by a racist mob. Their experience of discrimination there led to a
civil rights case.
Hansberry’s interest in Africa began at an early age. Hansberry’s
parents sent her to public schools rather than private ones as a protest
against the segregation laws. She studied art at the University of
Wisconsin and in Mexico. In Wisconsin she joined the Young Progressives
of America and later the Labor Youth League. After attending a school
performance of a play by the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, she decided to
become a writer. In 1950 she dropped out of college and moved to New
York. She took classes in writing at the New School for Social Research and
worked as an associate editor of Paul Robeson’s Freedom. During this
period she met among others the famous writer Langston Hughes. When she was completing a seminar
on African history under W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), she wrote a research paper on ‘The Belgian Congo:
A Preliminary Report on Its Land, Its History and Its People.’
In 1953 Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish literature student and songwriter, whom
she had met on a picket line protesting discrimination at New York University. She worked as a waitress
and cashier, writing on her spare time.
Her premature death, at the age of thirty-four, cut short her promising career. Lorraine
Hansberry died of cancer on January 2, 1965. Hansberry’s TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED, AND BLACK, adapted
from her writings, was produced Off-Broadway in 1969,