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Lorraine Hansberry

African-American playwright and author (1930–1965)

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and writer.^[1] She was the first African-American 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 in Chicago living under racial segregation. 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 age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.^[2] Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.

After she moved 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 her wor

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Lorraine Hansberry Biography

Lorraine Hansberry was born at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago on May 19, 1930. She was the youngest of Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry’s four children. Her father founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for blacks in Chicago, and ran a successful real estate business. Her uncle was William Leo Hansberry, a scholar of African studies at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

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.

Despite their middle-class status, the Hansberrys were subject to segregation. When she was 8 years old, Hansberry’s family deliberately attempted to move into a restricted neighborhood. Restrictive covenants, in which white property owners agreed not to sell to blacks, created a ghetto known as the “Black Belt” on Chicago’s South Side. Carl Hansbe

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Hansberry originally wanted to be an artist when she attended the University of Wisconsin, but soon changed her focus to study drama and stage design. After two years, she left college for New York to serve as a writer and editor of Paul Robeson’s left-wing newspaper Freedom. Hansberry, an outspoken Communist, was committed to racial equity and participated in civil rights demonstrations. It was at one of these demonstrations that Hansberry met her husband and closest friend, Robert Nemiroff.

Despite her being married, Hansberry secretly affirmed her homosexuality in various correspondence and in short stories later discovered in archives. She continued to write plays, short stories, and articles in addition to delivering speeches regarding race relations in the United States. She became close friends with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. It was with those friends and Nemiroff that she kept a secret about the pancreatic cancer that would eventually take her life on January 12, 1965, at age 34. Simone penned the song “Young, Gifted and Black” in tribute to her good friend