Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and civil rights activist. She was the first Black American female author to have a play performed on Broadway.
Hansberry's best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes. At the age of 29, Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, making her the first Black American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Her family challenged a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
After moving to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other Black intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of Hansberry's work during this time concerned the decolonization of Africa and its impact on the world. She also wrote about the oppression of women and gay people. Hansberry died in 1965 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34, two days after the end of the Broadway run of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. A line from one of Hansberry's speeches inspired the Nina Simone song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black".
Early life and family Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Nannie Louise (née, Perry), a schoolteacher and ward committeeperson, and Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real estate broker. In 1938, her father bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago, angering some of the white neighbors. The latter's legal efforts to force the Hansberry family out culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hansberry v. Lee, . The restrictive covenant was ruled contestable, although not inherently invalid; the enforcement of such covenants were eventually ruled unconstitutional in Shelley v. Kraemer, .
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 15 years old. The Hansberrys were routinely visited by prominent Black people, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and Jesse Owens.
Carl Hansberry's brother, William Leo Hansberry, founded the African Civilization section of the History Department at Howard University. Director and playwright Shauneille Perry is her first cousin, and Perry's eldest child is named after her. Hansberry's grandniece is the actor Taye Hansberry. Her cousin is musician Aldridge Hansberry. Hansberry was the godmother to Nina Simone's daughter Lisa.
Education and political involvement Hansberry is a 1944 graduate from Betsy Ross Elementary and a 1948 graduate from Englewood High School. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she 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 in order to pursue her career as a writer in New York City, where she attended The New School. Hansberry moved to Harlem in 1951, and she 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 that was edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. Du Bois and other Black Pan-Africanists. Hansberry wrote news articles and editorials and worked as a "subscription clerk, receptionist, typist, and editorial assistant."
Hansberry also wrote scripts at Freedom. To celebrate the newspaper's first anniversary, she wrote the script for a rally at Rockland Palace, a then-famous Harlem hall, on the history of Black newspapers in America in the struggle for freedom from 1827 on. Performers in this pageant included Paul Robeson, Lawrence Brown, Asadata Dafora, and numerous others. The following year, Hansberry collaborated on a pageant for the newspaper's Negro History Festival with the playwright Alice Childress, another author for the newspaper, as well as with Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Douglas Turner Ward, and John Oliver Killens. This is her earliest surviving theatrical work.
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's convening in Washington, D.C., led by Mary Church Terrell. Hansberry traveled to Georgia to cover the case of Willie McGee and she was inspired to write the poem "Lynchsong" about his case.
Hansberry also worked on global struggles against colonialism and imperialism. She wrote in support of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, criticizing the mainstream press for its biased coverage. Hansberry often focused on the female participants in these struggles. She was particularly interested in the rights of Muslim women in Egypt.
In 1952, Hansberry attended a peace conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, in place of Robeson, who had been denied travel rights by the United States Department of State.
Marriage and personal life On June 20, 1953, Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, a publisher, songwriter, and political activist. They moved to Greenwich Village, which would become the setting of her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. On the night before their wedding, Nemiroff and Hansberry protested against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York City.
The financial success of the pop song "Cindy, Oh Cindy", co-authored by Nemiroff, enabled Hansberry to start writing full-time. Although the couple separated in 1957 and divorced in the early 1960s, their personal and professional relationship lasted until Hansberry's death, they held property together, and he was the executor in charge of her works.
Hansberry wrote about lesbian inclinations. Before her marriage, Hansberry had written in her personal notebooks about her attraction to women.. 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 only under her initials, first "L.H.N." and later "L.N.". Pointing to these two letters as evidence, some writers credit Hansberry as having been an activist for gay rights, however, according to her biographer, 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 states that Hansberry's lesbian inclinations left her feeling isolated while A Raisin in the Sun catapulted her to fame. He speculates that 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". Before her death, Hansberry built a circle of gay and lesbian friends, took several lovers, vacationed in Provincetown, and subscribed to several homophile magazines..
Atheistic themes were expressed openly by Hansberry within her dramas, particularly A Raisin in the Sun. Critics and historians have contextualized the humanist themes of her work within a broader history of Black atheist literature and a wider English-language humanist tradition.
Upon Hansberry's death in 1965, Robert Nemiroff donated all of her personal and professional effects to the New York Public Library. He was the appointed executor for her works left unfinished. Nemiroff curated them, sometimes completed them, and had them performed and published. He blocked access to all of her materials related to lesbianism from access by scholars or biographers. In 2013, Nemiroff's daughter, Joi Gresham, released the restricted materials to Kevin J. Mumford, who explored that aspect of her life in his 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 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, A Raisin in the Sun was translated into 35 languages and was performed all around the world.
In April 1959, photographer David Attie did a photoshoot of Hansberry for Vogue magazine, in the apartment at 337 Bleecker Street where she had written A Raisin in the Sun. That shoot produced many of the best-known images of her today. In her biography Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, Imani Perry writes that in his 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 it was directed by Daniel Petrie.
In 1961, Hansberry replaced Vinnette Carroll as the director of the musical Kicks and Co, after its try-out at Chicago's McCormick Place. A satire involving miscegenation, the show was co-produced by Hansberry's 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, 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 that had been set up by James Baldwin.
Hansberry agreed to speak to the winners of the Reader's Digest/UNCF creative writing contest on May 1, 1964. The speech was entitled, "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black".
On June 16, 1963, Hansberry chaired a Rally to Support the Southern Freedom Movement at Temple Israel in Croton-on-Hudson to raise funds for civil rights organizations, particularly ones focusing on voting rights in the Southern United States. Hansberry introduced the key speaker, Jerome Smith (an organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality who had also participated in the Baldwin–Kennedy meeting), to the "predominantly white crowd" of 1,000. Some of the $5,000 raised went to purchase the used station wagon that Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were driving the following summer when they were murdered.
That same year, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Hansberry underwent two operations, on June 24 and August 2, but neither of the surgeries succeeded in curing the cancer.