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 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. The Hansberrys were routinely visited by prominent Black people, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, Duke Ellington, and Jesse Owens. 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.

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. 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. 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."

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. released the restricted materials to Kevin J. Mumford, who explored that aspect of her life in his work. Over the next two years, A Raisin in the Sun was translated into 35 languages and was performed all around the world. 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.

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.the only other play by Hansberry given a contemporary production was The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. 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 a town hall debate on June 15, 1964, Hansberry criticized white liberals who could not 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."

Death

On January 12, 1965, Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer; she was 34 years old.

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 a message from James Baldwin, as well as a message from Martin Luther King Jr. that 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." Hansberry is buried at Asbury United Methodist Church Cemetery in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

Posthumous publications

Hansberry 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. The play appeared in book form the following year under the title To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words.

Nemiroff donated Hansberry's personal and professional effects to the New York Public Library. Scholar Kevin J. Mumford asserts that Nemiroff "separated out the lesbian-themed correspondence, diaries, unpublished manuscripts, and full runs of the homophile magazines and restricted them from access to researchers." In 2013, more than 20 years after Nemiroff's death, a new executor released the restricted material that Mumford used.

Legacy

In 1973, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, entitled Raisin, opened on Broadway, with music by Judd Woldin, lyrics by Robert Brittan, and a book by Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltzberg. The show ran for more than two years and won two Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

In 2004, A Raisin in the Sun was revived on Broadway in a production starring Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Phylicia Rashad, and Audra McDonald, and directed by Kenny Leon. The production won Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Play for Rashad and Best Featured Actress in a Play for McDonald, and received a nomination for Best Revival of a Play.

In 2008, the production was adapted for television with the same cast, winning the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special.

In 2014, the play was revived on Broadway again in a production starring Denzel Washington, directed again by Kenny Leon. It won three Tony Awards, for Best Revival of a Play, Best Featured Actress in a Play for Sophie Okonedo, and Best Direction of a Play.

In 1969, Nina Simone released a song about Hansberry entitled "To Be Young, Gifted and Black". The title of the song refers to Hansberry's speech to the winners of a creative writing conference on May 1, 1964. 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." 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). The single reached the top ten of the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. In the introduction of the live version, Simone talks about the difficulty of losing a close friend and talented artist in Hansberry.

Patricia and Fredrick McKissack wrote a biography of Hansberry for children, entitled Young, Black, and Determined, in 1998. The following year, Hansberry was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Hansberry in the biographical dictionary 100 Greatest African Americans.

The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco is named in her honor. It specializes in original stagings and revivals of African-American theater.

The first-year dormitory for women at Lincoln University is named Lorraine Hansberry Hall. A school in the Bronx is entitled Lorraine Hansberry Academy and an elementary school in St. Albans, Queens, is named after Hansberry as well. Lorraine Hansberry Elementary School was located in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Heavily damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it has since closed.

In 2010, on the eightieth anniversary of Hansberry's birth, Adjoa Andoh presented a BBC Radio 4 program entitled Young, Gifted and Black in tribute to her life.

Founded in 2004 and officially launched in 2006, The Hansberry Project was created as an African-American theater lab led by African-American artists in Seattle. A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) was their first incubator and, in 2012 they became an independent organization.

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 that celebrates LGBT history and people. This made her the first Chicago native to be honored along the North Halsted corridor. That same year, Hansberry was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

In 2017, Hansberry was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

In January 2018, the PBS series American Masters released a documentary, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, directed by Tracy Heather Strain.

Through the efforts of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, Hansberry's apartment on Bleecker Street was listed on the New York State Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.

The Lorraine Hansberry Coalition of Croton (LHC), a volunteer group, was established in 2021 to celebrate the life and works of Lorraine Hansberry and to build on her legacy through free public programs.

On June 9, 2022, the Lilly Awards Foundation unveiled a statue of Hansberry in Times Square. The statue was sent on a tour of major U.S. cities. On August 23, 2024, it was unveiled at its permanent home on Chicago's Navy Pier with a special ceremony, including an outdoor screening of the 1961 movie, A Raisin in the Sun. The sculpture, by Alison Saar, is entitled "To Sit A While" and features Hansberry surrounded by five life-sized bronze chairs representing different aspects of her life and work. The title is a quote from Hansberry.

In March 2026, through LHC advocacy, Lorraine Hansberry was posthumously awarded the 2026 Trailblazers Award by Westchester County, New York, and the village of Croton-on-Hudson renamed a section of a Croton street running past her grave and the Croton Free Library as Lorraine Hansberry Way.

Works

Plays

  • A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
  • The Drinking Gourd (1960)
  • What Use Are Flowers? (1962)
  • The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1965)
  • To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (adapted by Robert Nemiroff, 1969)
  • Les Blancs (compiled and edited by Robert Nemiroff, 1994)
  • The Arrival of Mr. Todog (unpublished)
  • Toussaint (unfinished)

Other writing

  • "On Summer" (essay, 1960)
  • A Raisin in the Sun (screenplay, 1961)
  • The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (book, 1964)

See also

  • African-American literature
  • Clybourne Park – inspired by A Raisin in the Sun
  • Feminist existentialism

References

Further reading

  • Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust
  • Guide to the Lorraine Hansberry papers at the New York Public Library
  • "The Black Revolution and the White Backlash" – June 1964 speech by Lorraine Hansberry at the Forum at Town Hall sponsored by The Association of Artists for Freedom, New York City.
  • Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry's Letters to "The Ladder" – Brooklyn Museum exhibition, November 2013 – March 2014
  • FBI files on Lorraine Hansberry
  • Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart documentary about Hansberry
  • Guide to the Richard Hoffman - Lorraine Hansberry collection at the University of Delaware Library