Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry (born May 19, 1930, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died January 12, 1965, New York City, New York) was an American playwright and civil rights activist whose play A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first drama by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway.

Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real estate broker who also founded one of the first banks for Black people in Chicago, and Nannie Perry Hansberry, a teacher. The family lived on the South Side of Chicago. Hansberry’s parents were active in the fight for civil rights, and they were acquainted with many prominent Black thinkers, artists, and politicians, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes. When Lorraine was about seven years old, her family moved to the white neighborhood of Woodlawn to challenge a restrictive covenant law that forbade Black people to reside, lease, or buy property there. Neighbors filed a lawsuit in an attempt to keep the Hansberrys from moving in, and the family was harassed by a violent mob. They were forced to leave their home after the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the restrictive covenant law; in 1940 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this ruling on a legal technicality. The experience would later inspire Hansberry’s most famous play.

Hansberry was interested in writing from an early age and while in high school was drawn especially to the theater. She attended the University of Wisconsin in 1948–50 and then briefly the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Roosevelt University (Chicago). After moving to New York City, she held various minor jobs and studied at the New School for Social Research while refining her writing skills.

In 1958 she raised funds to produce her play A Raisin in the Sun, which was based on her family’s experience of moving to Woodlawn. The play opened in March 1959 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, meeting with great success. A penetrating psychological study of the personalities and emotional conflicts within a working-class Black family in Chicago, A Raisin in the Sun was directed by actor Lloyd Richards, the first African American to direct a play on Broadway since 1907. It won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and the film version of 1961 received a special award at the Cannes film festival. Hansberry’s next play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, a drama of political questioning and affirmation set in New York’s Greenwich Village, where she had long made her home, had only a modest run on Broadway in 1964.

Like her parents and like many African American writers of the 1960s, Hansberry was deeply involved with the civil rights movement. In 1963 she and James Baldwin were part of a group of artists who met with U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in an attempt to open a dialogue between the government and activists. Hansberry was particularly vocal during the meeting, demanding fruitlessly that Kennedy make a “moral commitment” on the issue of civil rights rather than treat it merely as a legal or social issue. The meeting ended in rancorous disappointment after Hansberry walked out in disgust.

In 1965, Hansberry’s promising career was cut short by her early death at age 34 from pancreatic cancer. In 1969 a selection of her writings, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (to whom Hansberry was married from 1953 to 1964), was produced on Broadway as To Be Young, Gifted, and Black and was published in book form in 1970. Hansberry’s life has been the subject of many biographies as well as the documentary film Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart (2017).