Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate broker, and Nannie Louise (born Perry), a driving schoolteacher and ward committeewoman. In 1938, Carl bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago, incurring the wrath of some of their white neighbors. the enforcement of such covenants were eventually ruled unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer, . Carl was also a supporter of the Urban League and NAACP in Chicago. Both Hansberrys were active in the Chicago Republican Party. Carl died in 1946 when Lorraine was 15 years old; "American racism helped kill him," she later said. The Hansberrys were routinely visited by prominent black people, including sociology professor W. E. B. Du Bois, poet Langston Hughes, singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson, musician Duke Ellington, and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens. Carl Hansberry's brother, William Leo Hansberry, founded the African Civilization section of the History Department at Howard University. Lorraine was taught: "Above all, there were two things which were never to be betrayed: the family and the race." ==Education and political involvement==

Hansberry graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary in 1944 and from Englewood High School in 1948. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she immediately became politically active with the Communist Party USA and integrated a dormitory. Hansberry's classmate Bob Teague remembered her as "the only girl I knew who could whip together a fresh picket sign with her own hands, at a moment's notice, for any cause or occasion". Hansberry worked on Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party presidential campaign in 1948, despite her mother's disapproval. Hansberry spent the summer of 1949 in Mexico, studying painting at the University of Guadalajara. ==Move to New York==

. In 1950, Hansberry decided to leave Madison and pursue her career as a writer in New York City, where she attended The New School. Hansberry moved to Harlem in 1951 and became involved in activist struggles such as the fight against evictions. Freedom newspaper and activism In 1951, Hansberry joined the staff of the black newspaper Freedom, edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. Du Bois, whose office was in the same building, and other black Pan-Africanists. besides writing news articles and editorials. on "the history of the Negro newspaper in America and its fighting role in the struggle for a people's freedom, from 1827 to the birth of FREEDOM." Performers in this pageant included Paul Robeson, his longtime accompanist Lawrence Brown, the multi-discipline artist Asadata Dafora, and numerous others. The following year, Hansberry collaborated with the already produced playwright Alice Childress, who also wrote for Freedom, on a pageant for its Negro History Festival, with Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Douglas Turner Ward, and John O. Killens. This is her earliest remaining theatrical work. Like Robeson and many black civil rights activists, Hansberry understood the struggle against white supremacy to be interlinked with the program of the Communist Party. One of her first reports covered the Sojourners for Truth and Justice convened in Washington, D.C., by Mary Church Terrell. Hansberry traveled to Georgia to cover the case of Willie McGee, and was inspired to write the poem "Lynchsong" about his case. Hansberry worked on not only the US civil rights movement, but also global struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Hansberry often explained these global struggles in terms of female participants. She was particularly interested in the situation of Egypt, In 1952, Hansberry attended a peace conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, in place of Robeson, who had been denied travel rights by the State Department. They moved to Greenwich Village, the setting of her second Broadway play, ''The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window''. On the night before their wedding in 1953, Nemiroff and Hansberry protested against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York City. The success of the hit pop song "Cindy, Oh Cindy", co-authored by Nemiroff, enabled Hansberry to start writing full-time. Hansberry lived for many years as a closeted lesbian. In 1957, around the time Hansberry separated from Nemiroff, she contacted the Daughters of Bilitis, the San Francisco-based lesbian rights organization, contributing two letters to their magazine, The Ladder, both of which were published under her initials, first "L.H.N." and then "L.N." Pointing to these letters as evidence, some gay and lesbian writers credited Hansberry as having been involved in the homophile movement or as having been an activist for gay rights. However, according to Kevin J. Mumford, beyond reading homophile magazines and corresponding with their creators, "no evidence has surfaced" to support claims that Hansberry was directly involved in the movement for gay and lesbian civil equality. Mumford stated that Hansberry's lesbianism left her feeling isolated while A Raisin in the Sun catapulted her to fame; still, while "her impulse to cover evidence of her lesbian desires sprang from other anxieties of respectability and conventions of marriage, Hansberry was well on her way to coming out." Near the end of her life, Hansberry declared herself "committed [to] this homosexuality thing" and vowed to "create my lifenot just accept it". and subscribed to several homophile magazines. In 1964, Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced but continued to work together. Upon his ex-wife's death, Robert Nemiroff donated all of Hansberry's personal and professional effects to the New York Public Library. In doing so, he blocked access to all materials related to Hansberry's lesbianism, meaning that no scholars or biographers had access for more than 50 years. In 2013, Nemiroff's daughter released the restricted materials to Kevin J. Mumford, who explored Hansberry's self-identification in subsequent work. ==Success as playwright==

Written and completed in 1957, A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, becoming the first play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. The 29-year-old author became the youngest American playwright and only the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Hansberry was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, among the four Tony Awards that the play was nominated for in 1960. Over the next two years, Raisin was translated into 35 languages and was being performed all over the world. In April 1959, as a sign of her sudden fame just one month after A Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway, photographer David Attie did an extensive photo-shoot of Hansberry for Vogue magazine, in the apartment at 337 Bleecker Street where she had written Raisin, which produced many of the best-known images of her today. In her award-winning Hansberry biography Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, Imani Perry writes that in his "gorgeous" images, "Attie captured her intellectual confidence, armour, and remarkable beauty." In 1960, during Delta Sigma Theta's 26th national convention in Chicago, Hansberry was made an honorary member. Hansberry's screenplay of A Raisin in the Sun was produced by Columbia Pictures and released in 1961. The film starred Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, and was directed by Daniel Petrie. In 1961, Hansberry was set to replace Vinnette Carroll as the director of the musical Kicks and Co, after its try-out at Chicago's McCormick Place. Written by Oscar Brown, Jr., the show featured an interracial cast including Lonnie Sattin, Nichelle Nichols, Vi Velasco, Al Freeman, Jr., Zabeth Wilde, and Burgess Meredith in the title role of Mr. Kicks. A satire involving miscegenation, the $400,000 production was co-produced by her husband Robert Nemiroff. Despite a warm reception in Chicago, the show never made it to Broadway. In 1962, Lorraine Hansberry and Robert Nemiroff bought a house on Quaker Bridge Road, just across the Croton River from Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Hansberry put up a sign calling the house ”Chitterling Heights.” On May 24, 1963, Hansberry participated in a meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, set up by James Baldwin. Some of the $5,000 raised went to purchase the used station wagon that Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney drove the following summer when they were murdered. While many of her other writings were published in her lifetimeessays, articles, and the text for the SNCC book The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equalitythe only other play given a contemporary production was ''The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window''. and closed the night she died. ==Beliefs==

According to historian Fanon Che Wilkins, "Hansberry believed that gaining civil rights in the United States and obtaining independence in colonial Africa were two sides of the same coin that presented similar challenges for Africans on both sides of the Atlantic." In response to the independence of Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah, Hansberry wrote: "The promise of the future of Ghana is that of all the colored peoples of the world; it is the promise of freedom." Regarding tactics, Hansberry said blacks "must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent... They must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on stepsand shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities." In a Town Hall debate on June 15, 1964, Hansberry criticized white liberals who could not accept civil disobedience, expressing a need to "encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical." At the same time, she said, "some of the first people who have died so far in this struggle have been white men." Hansberry was a critic of existentialism, which she considered too distant from the world's economic and geopolitical realities. Along these lines, she wrote a critical review of Richard Wright's The Outsider and went on to style her final play Les Blancs as a foil to Jean Genet's absurdist Les Nègres. However, Hansberry admired Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. In 1959, Hansberry commented that women who are "twice oppressed" may become "twice militant". She held out some hope for male allies of women, writing in an unpublished essay: "If by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved." Hansberry was appalled by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took place while she was in high school. She expressed a desire for a future in which "Nobody fights. We get rid of all the little bombsand the big bombs," though she also believed in the right of people to defend themselves with force against their oppressors. The FBI began surveillance of Hansberry when she prepared to go to the Montevideo peace conference. The Washington, D.C., office searched her passport files "in an effort to obtain all available background material on the subject, any derogatory information contained therein, and a photograph and complete description," while officers in Milwaukee and Chicago examined her life history. Later, an FBI reviewer of Raisin in the Sun highlighted its Pan-Africanist themes as "dangerous". ==Death==

On January 12, 1965, Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer; she was only 34 years old. Hansberry's funeral was held in Harlem on January 15, 1965. Paul Robeson and SNCC organizer James Forman gave eulogies. The presiding minister, Eugene Callender, recited a message from Baldwin, and also a message from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that read: "Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn." The 15th was also Dr. King's birthday. Hansberry is buried at Asbury United Methodist Church Cemetery in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. ==Posthumous works==

Hansberry's ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, became the executor for several unfinished manuscripts. It appeared in book form the following year under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. Hansberry left behind an unfinished novel and several other plays, including The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers?, with a range of content, from slavery to a post-apocalyptic future. ==Legacy==

In 1973, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, entitled Raisin, opened on Broadway, with music by Judd Woldin, lyrics by Robert Brittan, and a book by Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltzberg. The show ran for more than two years and won two Tony Awards, including Best Musical. In 2004, A Raisin in the Sun was revived on Broadway in a production starring Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Phylicia Rashad, and Audra McDonald, and directed by Kenny Leon. The production won Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Play for Rashad and Best Featured Actress in a Play for McDonald, and received a nomination for Best Revival of a Play. In 2008, the production was adapted for television with the same cast, winning two NAACP Image Awards. In 2014, the play was revived on Broadway again in a production starring Denzel Washington, directed again by Kenny Leon; it won three Tony Awards, for Best Revival of a Play, Best Featured Actress in a Play for Sophie Okonedo, and Best Direction of a Play. In 1969, Nina Simone first released a song about Hansberry called "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." The title of the song refers to the title of Hansberry's autobiography, which Hansberry first coined when speaking to the winners of a creative writing conference on May 1, 1964: "Though it is a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamicto be young, gifted and black." The single reached the top 10 of the R&B charts. In the introduction of the live version, Simone explains the difficulty of losing a close friend and talented artist. Patricia and Fredrick McKissack wrote a children's biography of Hansberry, Young, Black, and Determined, in 1998. The following year, Hansberry was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Hansberry in the biographical dictionary 100 Greatest African Americans. The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre of San Francisco, which specializes in original stagings and revivals of African-American theatre, is named in her honor. Lincoln University's first-year female dormitory is named Lorraine Hansberry Hall. There is a school in the Bronx called Lorraine Hansberry Academy, and an elementary school in St. Albans, Queens, New York, named after Hansberry as well. In 2010, on the eightieth anniversary of Hansberry's birth, Adjoa Andoh presented a BBC Radio 4 program entitled Young, Gifted and Black in tribute to her life. Founded in 2004 and officially launched in 2006, The Hansberry Project of Seattle, Washington was created as an African-American theatre lab, led by African-American artists and was designed to provide the community with consistent access to the African-American artistic voice. A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) was their first incubator and in 2012 they became an independent organization. The Hansberry Project is rooted in the convictions that black artists should be at the center of the artistic process, that the community deserves excellence in its art, and that theatre's fundamental function is to put people in a relationship with one another. Their goal is to create a space where the entire community can be enriched by the voices of professional black artists, reflecting autonomous concerns, investigations, dreams, and artistic expression. In 2010, Hansberry was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. In 2013, Hansberry was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people. This made her the first Chicago native to be honored along the North Halsted corridor. That same year, Hansberry was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Lorraine Hansberry Elementary School was located in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it has since closed. In 2017, Hansberry was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In January 2018, the PBS series American Masters released a new documentary, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, directed by Tracy Heather Strain. On September 18, 2018, the biography Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, written by scholar Imani Perry, was published by Beacon Press. Through the efforts of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, Hansberry's apartment on Bleecker Street was listed on the New York State Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places in 2021. The Lorraine Hansberry Coalition of Croton (LHC), a volunteer-driven group, was established in 2021 to elevate and celebrate the life and works of Lorraine Hansberry and to build on her legacy through free public programs. On June 9, 2022, the Lilly Awards Foundation unveiled a statue of Hansberry in Times Square. The statue was sent on a tour of major US cities. On August 23, 2024, it was unveiled at its permanent home on Chicago's Navy Pier with a special ceremony, including an outdoor screening of the 1961 movie, A Raisin in the Sun. The sculpture, by Alison Saar, is entitled "To Sit A While," and features Hansberry surrounded by five life-sized bronze chairs representing different aspects of her life and work. In March, 2026, through LHC advocacy, Lorraine Hansberry was posthumously awarded the 2026 Trailblazers Award by Westchester County, New York, and the Village of Croton-on-Hudson renamed a section of a Croton street running past her grave and the Croton Free Library as Lorraine Hansberry Way. ==Works==

• A Raisin in the Sun (1959) • A Raisin in the Sun, screenplay (1961) • "On Summer" (essay) (1960) • The Drinking Gourd (1960) • What Use Are Flowers? (written c. 1962) • The Arrival of Mr. Todog – a parody of Waiting for Godot • The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964) • ''The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window'' (1965) • To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969) • Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays / by Lorraine Hansberry. Edited by Robert Nemiroff (1994) • Toussaint. This fragment from a work in progress, unfinished at the time of Hansberry's untimely death, deals with a Haitian plantation owner and his wife whose lives are soon to change drastically as a result of the revolution of Toussaint L'Ouverture. (From the Samuel French, Inc. catalog of plays.) ==See also==