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Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright, essayist, and civil rights activist. Her 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. $$PLAIN_TEXT_PREVIEW$$
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Celebrating the birth & legacy of
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“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.” — Lorraine Hansberry
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Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was a playwright, essayist, and civil rights activist. Her 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. When “Raisin” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, Hansberry — at 29 — became the youngest American and the first Black recipient. Although she died at just 34, her ability to address social and racial issues in her writings has left a profound legacy.
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She grew up in Chicago, the youngest of four siblings whose father was Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real estate broker and social activist, and mother Nannie Louise, a driving school teacher and ward committeewoman. In 1938, after her father bought a house in the south side of Chicago, Hansberry's family struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 US Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. Many prominent African American social and political leaders visited the Hansberry household during Lorraine’s childhood including sociology professor W.E.B. DuBois, poet Langston Hughes, actor and political activist Paul Robeson, musician Duke Ellington and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens.
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“Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.” — Lorraine Hansberry
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In 1950, at the age of twenty, Hansberry left college to pursue a career in writing in New York City. The following year, she joined the staff of Freedom, a progressive black journal headed by Paul Robeson. During a protest against racial discrimination at New York University, she met Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer who shared her political views. They married in 1953. In A Raisin in the Sun, she drew upon the lives of the working-class Black people who rented from her father and who went to school with her on Chicago’s South Side. She also used members of her family as inspiration for her characters. The play’s title comes from the first lines of Harlem, a poem by Langston Hughes: What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
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Hansberry wrote the screenplay for the 1961 film version starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee who also starred in the original Broadway production. A Raisin in the Sun has been revived on Broadway twice (2004 and 2014) and continues to be performed around the world. Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, about a Jewish intellectual, ran on Broadway for 101 performances, closing on January 12, 1965, the day Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at 34. |
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Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced before her death, but he remained dedicated to her work. As literary executor, he edited and published her three unfinished plays: Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers? Les Blancs premiered on Broadway in 1970, starring a young James Earl Jones. Rogue Machine Theatre presented the Los Angeles premiere of the play in 2017 featuring Desean Terry, Anne Gee Bryd, Bill Brochtrup and Joel Swetow. Nemiroff also collected Hansberry’s unpublished writings, speeches and journal entries and presented them in the autobiographical montage To Be Young, Gifted and Black. |
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The title is taken from a speech given by Hansberry in May 1964 to winners of a United Negro Fund writing competition: “…though it be thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic, to be young, gifted and black!” Actors Co-op produced To Be Young Gifted and Black in 2013.
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To Be Young Gifted and Black, Actors Co-op 2013
Photo Credit: Lindsay Schnebly |
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As The National Endowment for the Humanities so aptly stated, “Though her life and career were cut tragically short, she continues to draw the pointed attention of critics, historians, documentarians, and adoring audiences alike precisely because she reminds us that even in our awkwardness, even as we stumble about and try to make sense of ourselves in rooms that were never intended to contain or comfort us, we nonetheless might take heart that it is exactly this sense of anxiety and embarrassment, this lack of simplicity, which we might (indeed must) utilize as we seek, in the midst of irritation and confusion, a way forward.”
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“One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.” — Lorraine Hansberry
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Portions of this biography were provided by the Chicago Public Library and Literary Ladies Guide.
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Learn More About
LORRAINE HANSBERRY:
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We will celebrate the birth of Lorraine Hansberry with a performance from one of her plays by Actors Co-op company member, Eva Abramian!
This performance will be delivered to you for safe viewing at home, via email. |
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