Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January
12, 1965) was an African-American playwright
and writer.Hansberry was the first black female
author to have a play performed on Broadway.
Her best known work, the play A Raisin in
the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans
living under racial segregation in Chicago.
Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation,
challenging a restrictive covenant and eventually
provoking the Supreme Court case Hansberry
v. Lee. The title of the play was taken from
the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What
happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?"
At the young age of 29, she won the New York's
Drama Critic's Circle Award — making her
the first African American dramatist, the
fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to
do so.After she moved to New York City, Hansberry
worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom,
where she dealt with intellectuals such as
Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of
her work during this time concerned the African
struggle for liberation and their impact on
the world. Hansberry has been identified as
a lesbian, and sexual freedom is an important
topic in several of her works. She died of
cancer at the age of 34. Hansberry inspired
Nina Simone's song "To Be Young, Gifted and
Black".
== Family ==
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 school teacher
and ward committeewoman. In 1938, her father
bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision
of the South Side of Chicago, incurring the
wrath of their white neighbors. The latter's
legal efforts to force the Hansberry family
out culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court's
decision in Hansberry v. Lee. The restrictive
covenant was ruled contestable, though not
inherently invalid.
Carl Hansberry 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 fifteen
years old; "American racism helped kill him,"
she later said.The Hansberrys were routinely
visited by prominent Black intellectuals,
including W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson.
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."Lorraine Hansberry
has many notable relatives including director
and playwright Shauneille Perry, whose eldest
child is named after her. Her grandniece is
actress Taye Hansberry. Her cousin is the
flutist, percussionist, and composer Aldridge
Hansberry.
Hansberry became the godmother to Nina Simone's
daughter Lisa—now known as Simone.
== Education ==
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
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".She worked
on Henry A. Wallace's presidential campaign
in 1948, despite her mother's disapproval.
She spent the summer of 1949 in Mexico, studying
painting at the University of Guadalajara.
== Move to New York City ==
She decided in 1950 to leave Madison and pursue
her career as a writer in New York City, where
she attended The New School. She moved to
Harlem in 1951 and became involved in activist
struggles such as the fight against evictions.
=== Freedom newspaper ===
In 1951, she joined the staff of the black
journal Freedom Newspaper, 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. At the newspaper,
she worked as "subscription clerk, receptionist,
typist and editorial assistant" in addition
to writing news articles and editorials.One
of her first reports covered the Sojourners
for Truth and Justice convened in Washington,
D.C., by Mary Church Terrell. She traveled
to Georgia to cover the case of Willie McGee,
and was inspired to write the poem "Lynchsong"
about his case.She worked on not only the
US civil rights movement, but also global
struggles against colonialism and imperialism.
Hansberry wrote in support of the Mau Mau
Uprising in Kenya, criticizing the mainstream
press for its biased coverage.Hansberry often
clarified these global struggles by explaining
them in terms of female participants. She
was particularly interested in the situation
of Egypt, "the traditional Islamic 'cradle
of civilization,' where women had led one
of the most important fights anywhere for
the equality of their sex."In 1952, Hansberry
attended a peace conference in Montevideo,
Uruguay, in place of Paul Robeson, who had
been denied travel rights by the State Department.
=== Marriage ===
On June 20, 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff,
a Jewish publisher, songwriter and political
activist. Hansberry and Nemiroff moved to
Greenwich Village, the setting of The Sign
in Sidney Brustein's Window. Success of the
song "Cindy, Oh Cindy", co-authored by Nemiroff,
enabled Hansberry to start writing full-time.
On the night before their wedding in 1953,
Nemiroff and Hansberry protested the execution
of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York
City.It is widely believed that Hansberry
was a closeted lesbian, a theory supported
by her secret writings in letters and personal
notebooks. She was an activist for gay rights
and wrote about feminism and homophobia, joining
the Daughters of Bilitis and contributing
two letters to their magazine, The Ladder,
in 1957 under her initials "LHN." She separated
from her husband at this time, but they continued
to work together.A Raisin in the Sun was written
at this time and completed in 1957.
== Success as playwright ==
Opening on March 11, 1959, A Raisin in the
Sun became the first play written 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. 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 growing fame,
photographer David Attie did an extensive
photo-shoot of Hansberry, at home in her Bleecker
Street apartment, for Vogue magazine.Hansberry
wrote two screenplays of Raisin, both of which
were rejected as controversial by Columbia
Pictures. Commissioned by NBC in 1960 to create
a television program about slavery, Hansberry
wrote The Drinking Gourd. This script was
called "superb" but also rejected.In 1960,
during Delta Sigma Theta's 26th national convention
in Chicago, Hansberry was made an honorary
member.
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., it 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 1963, Hansberry
participated in a meeting with Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy, set up by James Baldwin.Also
in 1963, Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic
cancer. She underwent two operations, on June
24 and August 2. Neither was successful in
removing the cancer.On March 10, 1964, Hansberry
and Nemiroff divorced but continued to work
together.While many of her other writings
were published in her lifetime—essays, articles,
and the text for the SNCC book The Movement—the
only other play given a contemporary production
was The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window ran for
101 performances on Broadway 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 steps—and 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 couldn't 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,
and expressed desire for a future in which:
"Nobody fights. We get rid of all the little
bombs—and the big bombs." She did believe
in the right of people to defend themselves
with force against their oppressors.The Federal
Bureau of Investigation 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 ==
Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer on January
12, 1965, aged 34. James Baldwin believed
"it is not at all farfetched to suspect that
what she saw contributed to the strain which
killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine
was dedicated is more than enough to kill
a man."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
messages from Baldwin and the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr. which 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. She 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.
He added minor changes to complete the play
Les Blancs, which Julius Lester termed her
best work, and he adapted many of her writings
into the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black,
which was the longest-running Off Broadway
play of the 1968–69 season. It appeared
in book form the following year under the
title To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine
Hansberry in Her Own Words. She 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 ==
Raisin, a musical based on A Raisin in the
Sun, opened in New York in 1973, winning the
Tony Award for Best Musical, with the book
by Nemiroff, music by Judd Woldin, and lyrics
by Robert Britten. A Raisin in the Sun was
revived on Broadway in 2004 and received a
Tony Award nomination for Best Revival of
a Play. The cast included Sean Combs ("P Diddy")
as Walter Lee Younger Jr., Phylicia Rashad
(Tony Award-winner for Best Actress) and Audra
McDonald (Tony Award-winner for Best Featured
Actress). It was produced for television in
2008 with the same cast, garnering two NAACP
Image Awards.
Nina Simone first released a song about Hansberry
in 1969 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 marvellous
thing to be merely young and gifted in such
times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic — to
be young, gifted and black." Simone wrote
the song with the poet Weldon Irvine and told
him that she wanted lyrics that would "make
black children all over the world feel good
about themselves forever." When Irvine read
the lyrics after it was finished, he thought,
"I didn't write this. God wrote it through
me." In a recording to the introduction of
the song, Simone explained 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.
In 1999 Hansberry was posthumously inducted
into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.In
2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Hansberry
as one of his 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. Singer and pianist Nina Simone,
who was a close friend of Hansberry, used
the title of her unfinished play to write
a civil rights-themed song "To Be Young, Gifted
and Black" together with Weldon Irvine. The
single reached the top 10 of the R&B charts.
A studio recording by Simone was released
as a single and the first live recording on
October 26, 1969, was captured on Black Gold
(1970).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.
On the eightieth anniversary of Hansberry's
birth, Adjoa Andoh presented a BBC Radio 4
programme entitled "Young, Gifted and Black"
in tribute to her life.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
which celebrates LGBT history and people.
This makes her the first Chicago-native honored
along the North Halsted corridor.Also in 2013,
Lorraine Hansberry was inducted into the American
Theatre Hall of Fame.Lorraine Hansberry Elementary
School was located in the 9th Ward of New
Orleans. Heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina
in 2005, it has since closed.
In 2017, she 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.
== 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 – 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. catalogue of plays.)
== 
See also ==
African American literature
Clybourne Park
Existentialist feminism
