Lorraine Hansberry

Early life

Lorraine Hansberry was born on 19 May 1930 on Chicago's South Side, the youngest of three children. Her mother, Nannie Perry Hansberry, was a schoolteacher. Her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, ran a real estate business and founded a bank.

In 1937 the family moved into a white neighborhood covered by a racially restrictive covenant. The Illinois Supreme Court upheld the covenant and the family was forced out. Her parents took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court and won Hansberry v. Lee in 1940. Her father died when she was fifteen.

Education and activism

After graduating from Englewood High School in 1948, Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison. PBS notes she was the first African American woman to live in its Langdon Manor residence hall. She left without a degree and in 1950 moved to New York, where she studied at the New School. By 1951 she was writing for Freedom, Paul Robeson's progressive newspaper, and she studied with W.E.B. Du Bois. Her journalism covered anti-colonial struggles in Africa, including support for the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, as well as racial injustice in the United States.

In 1953 she married Robert Nemiroff, a white Jewish writer she had met at a protest. Their marriage ended after nine years, but he remained her closest friend. Hansberry identified as a lesbian. At a time when homosexuality was criminalized she was not publicly out, but Imani Perry's biography describes her membership in one of the country's first lesbian organizations. Perry also notes that her activism brought her under FBI surveillance in her early twenties.

A Raisin in the Sun

Income from Nemiroff's 1956 hit song let Hansberry write full time. Her play about a working-class Black family in Chicago, first titled The Crystal Stair, was renamed with a phrase from Langston Hughes. A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959, directed by Lloyd Richards. Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. The play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, making her the first Black playwright and the youngest playwright to receive it. The original production ran for 530 performances, first with Sidney Poitier and then Ossie Davis as Walter Lee Younger, and a film version starring Poitier followed in 1961.

Later work and death

Her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, dealt with race, gender and sexuality. Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer on 12 January 1965, aged 34, and the play closed the same day. Her later play Les Blancs reached Broadway after her death, in 1970.

Legacy

Hansberry is remembered for A Raisin in the Sun, which has been translated into about 35 languages, and also as a radical political thinker. Perry's 2018 biography highlights her pressure on the Kennedy administration to act more boldly on civil rights, her support for African anti-colonial leaders, and her ties to Malcolm X, Langston Hughes and Du Bois.