"[37] Near the end of her life, she declared herself "committed [to] this homosexuality thing" and vowing to "create my lifenot just accept it". Lorraine Hansberry was rigorous and unyielding in her life, but she was gone too soon and claimed too quickly by those who thought they understood her. There she published her first poem, Flag From a Kitchenette Window, which depicts the American flag as seen through the window of a poor black persons apartment. In 2013, more than twenty years after Nemiroff's death, the new executor released the restricted material to scholar Kevin J. [41] He added minor changes to complete the play Les Blancs, which Julius Lester termed her best work, and he adapted many of her writings into the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was the longest-running Off Broadway play of the 196869 season. Commissioned by NBC in 1960 to create a television program about slavery, Hansberry wrote The Drinking Gourd. After the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961, African Americans across the nation protested. In a letter toReportermagazine, she declared her support for Jomo Kenyatta, an anti-colonial activist in Kenya arrested for his putative affiliation with the Mau Maus, a militant group that fought to expel the occupying British colonial forces. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. Politics dominated their family life as much as it did their public lives. Her investment in American politics did not lead to a simplistic patriotism or a belief in American exceptionalism but rather to a desire to see her country realize its (not unique) democratic potential. [42], Hansberry agreed to speak to the winners of a creative writing conference on May 1, 1964: "Though it is a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic to be young, gifted and black."[48]. Like O . Most people these days know Hansberry forA Raisin in the Sun, a play that took housing segregation as its subject. Walter Lee wants to invest Mama's $10,000 insurance check in a liquor store venture with two of his friends. Moving with her husband to Croton-on-Hudson, Lorraine Hansberry continued not only her writing but also her involvement with civil rights and other political protests. What are three interesting facts about Lorraine Hansberry? Les Blancstells their story by examining the mixed legacy of their father, an anti-colonial fighter, as well as the brutal and paternalistic legacy of their countrys colonizers. The artistic and political grounds on which they had grown, Perry explains, had left their generation ill prepared for responding to the struggles for racial emancipation. Liberal reformism was no longer adequate, nor was a countercultural avant-gardism. She first Black woman to have a play staged on Broadway. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930 at the beginning of the Great Depression. Nemiroff also put the finishing touches on some of Hansberrys incomplete plays, including The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers? According to Baldwin, Hansberry stated: "I am not worried about black men--who have done splendidly, it seems to me, all things considered.But I am very worriedabout the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the white cop standing on that Negro woman's neck in Birmingham. Carter, "Commitment amid Complexity" (1980), p. 43. Another brother refused his draft call, objecting to segregation and discrimination in the military. Hansberry's uncle, William Leo Hansberry, was a distinguished professor of African history at Howard University and had made a name for himself as a specialist in African antiquity. She held out some hope for male allies of women, writing in an unpublished essay: "If by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved. Her father was a plaintiff in a Supreme Court housing case. [24] Hansberry and Nemiroff moved to Greenwich Village, the setting of her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Dr. On January 12, 1965, Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at 34. Carter, "Commitment amid Complexity" (1980), p. 46. [18] The following year, she collaborated with the already produced playwright Alice Childress, who also wrote for Freedom, on a pageant for its Negro History Festival, with Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Douglas Turner Ward, and John O. Killens. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Hansberry identified as a lesbian, even though she remained married to Nemiroff. Lorraine Hansberry Elementary School was located in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The fact still feels intolerable, almost unassimilable her death not merely tragedy but a kind of theft. [35] In 2013, Nemiroff's daughter released the restricted materials to Kevin J. Mumford, who explored Hansberry's self-identification in subsequent work. In Hansberrys eyes, the victory showed that change came from below: Working-class people were central agents when it came to ameliorating black suffering. 8 Fascinating Facts About Lorraine Hansberry. Carter, "Commitment amid Complexity" (1980), p. 45. 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. Helping to realize their aspirations would prove to be a task for others to take up. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. Lorraine Hansberry. Over 600 people attended her funeral in Harlem. It was standing room only. [71], In 2013, Hansberry was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display that celebrates LGBT history and people. Definition and Examples, Biography of John Lewis, Civil Rights Activist and Politician, Biography of the Rev. On the night before their wedding in 1953, Nemiroff and Hansberry protested against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in New York City. Initially called The Crystal Stair, she later retitled it A Raisin in the Sun, a phrase taken from Langston Hughess poem, Harlem: A Dream Deferred. Raisin drew upon the lives of working-class African Americans who rented houses from her father and who Hansberry went to school with on the South Side. How did Lorraine Hansberry affect Earth? Patricia C. McKissack and Fredrick L, Young, Black and Determined: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry (New York: Holiday House, 1998). The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant . She worked on the 1948 presidential campaign for the Progressive Party, wrote in support of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, and covered the case of an African American man executed after an all-white jury deliberated his case for three minutes. Because the small number of people in the black elite were politically diverse, many of the family friends who visited her childhood home were socialists or radicals of various kinds. She was raised in an atmosphere suffused with activism and intellectual rigor. A satire involving miscegenation, the $400,000 production was co-produced by her husband Robert Nemiroff. 1477 Words6 Pages. 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. Hansberry's death in 1965, at the age of 34, curtailed her work's more radical, materialist, and socialist analyses. [57] However, Hansberry admired Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago. Hansberry believed that each human being is not only "dramatically interesting" but also a "creature of stature," and this is one of the most compelling features of her drama. Like many other Black giants of her time,. She was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 2013. "[30] and then "L.N. Critics and historians have contextualised the humanist themes of her work within a broader history of Black atheist literature and a wider English language humanist tradition. Hansberry's full-page report detailed the graphic and, inevitably, frustrating encounter between officials of the Justice Department and women like Amy Mallard, the widow of a World War II veteran who had been shot to death for attempting to vote in Georgia.". Carolina Knapp. Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1930. Though Carl Hansberry ultimately prevailed in a Supreme Court case,Hansberry v. Lee, in 1940, his daughters experience in Washington Park taught her that wealth and the legal system provided no guaranteed security against racism. Michael Landon. Carl was an illustrious real-estate . Later in the decade, she continued this project by writing queer fiction under the pseudonym Emily Jones. Instead, she wanted the good of all.. Anderson, "Freedom Family" (2008), p. 267. With the success in 1959 of A Raisin in the . It's called Young, Gifted and Black." Ten years earlier Hansberry, who herself coined that beautiful phrase, had become an overnight celebrity with her first play, A Raisin in the Sun. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. One of the biggest selling points aboutRaisin, recalled Ossie Davis, who eventually replaced Poitier as Walter Lee Younger, was how much theYounger family was just like any other American family.. They must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on stepsand shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities. In 1964, "The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality" was published for SNCC (StudentNonviolent Coordinating Committee) with text by Hansberry. Like. This is a short thirty-minute lesson on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. [3][4][5] Before her marriage, she had written in her personal notebooks about her attraction to women. I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. She was one of four siblings that includes two brothers and one sister. The decision is nevertheless considered to have been an early weakening in the restrictive covenants that enforced segregation nationally. They stayed married nearly to her death at 35 of pancreatic cancer. She tries to give the plant enough light and water not only to grow but also to flourish and become beautiful, just as she attempts to provide for her family with meager yet consistent financial support. Hansberry had other African American leaders in her family: her uncle William Leo Hansberry was a Professor of History at Howard University; her cousin, Shauneille Perry, was one of the first African American women to direct off-Broadway. Nina Simone dedicated a song to her. 2022. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/lorraine_Hansberry. [42] Also in 1963, Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She wrote and published A Raisin in the Sun in 1959. By 1951, she was writing for Paul Robesons Freedom, a progressive publication that put her in touch with other literary and political mentors. Both Hansberrys were active in the Chicago Republican Party. [42] She was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, among the four Tony Awards that the play was nominated for in 1960. June Almeida serves as a role model for determination and innovation. Nemiroff would become a financially successful songwriter. Famed author Louisa May Alcott created colorful relatable characters in 19th century novels. She turned to family members for inspiration for other characters. In 1956, Nemiroff co-wrote a hit song, Cindy, Oh Cindy. The profits allowed Hansberry to quit working at Freedom and devote her time exclusively to writing on her own. Studs . Like her, he was a dedicated leftist; the day before their wedding, they protested the death sentence imposed on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. African American equality also required anti-colonial liberation. For Hansberry, the failures of nonviolent protest not only were a matter of tactics but also reflected the intransigence of her generationa theme she explored inThe Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window. Performers in this pageant included Paul Robeson, his longtime accompanist Lawrence Brown, the multi-discipline artist Asadata Dafora, and numerous others. Here is all you want to know, and more! An FBI agent who watched the play as part of the bureaus surveillance of Hansberry, however, reported thatRaisincontains no comments of any nature about Communism as such and instead focuses on negro aspirations, as though one precluded the other. Toshiko Akiyoshi changed the face of jazz music over her sixty-year career. In 2008, the production was adapted for television with the same cast, winning two NAACP Image Awards. There she wrote about everything from Richard Wrights novelThe Outsider, which she disliked, to Kwame Nkrumahs election as prime minister of Ghana, which she applauded. [67], In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Hansberry in the biographical dictionary 100 Greatest African Americans.[68]. Du Bois, Duke Ellington, Walter White, Joe E. Louis, Jesse Owens, and others. They both ran out of time. Hansberry died the year prior, at the age of 34, after a battle with pancreatic cancer. Yvonne B. Miller, her accomplishments, and leadership attributes, so they can apply persuasive techniques to amplify her accomplishments, leadership attributes, as well as those in leadership roles in their community. "Biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Creator of 'Raisin in the Sun'." The night Nina Simone debuted at Carnegie Hall, Hansberry called not to congratulate her but to discuss what she could do to aid the civil rights movement. [1] She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Hansberrys budding interest in art took her to New York in 1950. [69] There is a school in the Bronx called Lorraine Hansberry Academy, and an elementary school in St. Albans, Queens, New York, named after Hansberry as well. And who was affirmative rather than negative. She also began taking and teaching classes at Marxist adult education centers alongside such famous black radicals as Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, and W.E.B. ThoughtCo, Apr. Hansberry left a number of finished and unfinished projects. When she was 8 years old, Hansberry's family moved house and desegregated a white neighborhood that had a restrictive covenant. Reading the work of the Irish dramatist Sean OCasey and then studying in Ajijic, Mexico, with the Guatemalan painter Carlos Mrida and others, she was introduced to an art that aimed at representing the global working class, those colonized people around the world who were being exploited in similar ways as black people in the United States. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry, a renowned essayist, playwright, and civil rights activist, was born on May 19th, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. He loved her mind and her self, just as she was. [41], When Nemiroff donated Hansberry's personal and professional effects to the New York Public Library, he "separated out the lesbian-themed correspondence, diaries, unpublished manuscripts, and full runs of the homophile magazines and restricted them from access to researchers." The lack of natural light in the apartment contributes to the sense of confinement, and the tiny amount of light that does manage to trickle into the apartment is a reminder both of the Youngers' dreams and of the deferment of those dreams. In 1937, Hansberrys parents challenged Chicagos restrictive housing covenants by moving into an all-white neighborhood. When Hansberry married, interracial marriage was still illegal in many states. Lorraine Hansberry Biography. [39][40], In 1964, Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced but continued to work together. Du Bois. Lorraine Hansberry was commissioned to write a television drama on the system of enslavement, which she completed as "The Drinking Gourd," but it was not produced. Hansberry's Drama. Biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Creator of 'Raisin in the Sun'. I must go down to the South. Even with her play in production and cancer killing her, she hoped to join the civil rights protests that had engulfed the South and find out what kind of revolutionary she was. Set in de facto segregated Chicago, Hansberry's play draws on stories from the author's own life, such as her family's . Wilkins, "Beyond Bandung" (2006), p. 195. The granddaughter of a formerly enslaved person, Lorraine Hansberry was born into a family that was active in the Black community of Chicago. Hansberrys success opened the doors for and inspired generations of African American artists. Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930 at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago. In 1937, Hansberry's parents challenged Chicago's restrictive housing covenants by moving into an all-white neighborhood. To celebrate the newspaper's first birthday, Hansberry wrote the script for a rally at Rockland Palace, a then-famous Harlem hall,[17] on "the history of the Negro newspaper in America and its fighting role in the struggle for a people's freedom, from 1827 to the birth of FREEDOM." "[53], James Baldwin described Hansberry's 1963 meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, in which Hansberry asked for a "moral commitment" on civil rights from Kennedy. Nemiroff, a white, Jewish writer, shared many of Hansberrys political views. Desiring to pursue her longtime interest in writing and theater, she then moved to New York to attend the New School for Social Research. Thus, Hansberry became deeply familiar with pan-African ideas and the international contours of black liberation at an early age (8).". The curtain rises to reveal the Younger family's living room in its modest home in Chicago's Southside. Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" Lincoln University's first-year female dormitory is named Lorraine Hansberry Hall. The Combahee River Collectives identification with socialism was not surface-level or a departure from the norm but rather the result of a long history of black feminisms concern with poverty, labor, and oppressive forms of governance. Princeton University Hansberrys death in 1965, at the age of 34, curtailed her works more radical, materialist, and socialist analyses. (Courtesy of Joi Gresham and the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust). The family hosted W.E.B. At times, this commitment caused her to focus more on politics than on her art, and at times it put her at odds with her less radical peers. Hansberry, in this way, was deeply committed to the United States, wanting to make it a more equitable and humane forcefor women, for black people, for queer people, and for colonized people across the globe. Angela Davis read the preeminent black left feminist of the postwar years, Claudia Jones. [14], In 1951, Hansberry joined the staff of the black newspaper Freedom, edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson. In 1948, Hansberry left Chicago for the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she began to tie her interest in the politics of poor black people to a growing interest in art. In the midst of the interview Terkel asked Lorraine what she thought about the scene of contemporary young black writers. Anderson, "Freedom Family" (2008), p. 263. The influence of her parents social network, combined with her early exposure to racism, helped radicalize Hansberry when she was still young. Baldwin, who couldnt attend the service, sent a wire insisting that we must not fail her. On May 22, 1967 Langston Hughes died after having had abdominal surgery. Working against what Wald calls a memory crisis, Perry, as well as scholars like Mary Helen Washington and Lawrence Jackson, have demonstrated what has been omitted from the few histories of the left that were published, to say nothing of the liberal histories of the period. Paul Robeson and SNCC organizer James Forman gave eulogies. "A Raisin in the Sun" is about a struggling Black family in Chicago and draws heavily from the lives of the working-class tenants who rented from her father. As Hansberry interrogated her own position and those of other members of the black elite in the civil rights movement, she also began to question their commitment to nonviolence. When inclusion meant an entrance into the unequal distribution of power and wealtheven when it meant her own material gainHansberry wanted no part of it. Margaret B. Wilkerson, Lorraine Hansberry, African American Writers 2, 2001. From left: Jack Manning/The . she turns away from him, ignore's him. Lorraine Hansberry 1930-1965. Her grandniece is the actress Taye Hansberry. Alan Jay Lerner. While many of her other writings were published in her lifetime essays, articles, and the text for the SNCC book The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality[49] the only other play given a contemporary production was The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. But as Imani Perry chronicles in her new biography,Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, the revolutionary Hansberry has long been hidden in plain sight. Her uncle William Leo Hansberry was a professor of African history. Recent scholarship by Imani Perry and Soyica Diggs Colbert and others has uncovered Hansberry's devotion to radical politics and her circle of friends and artists in and around the American Communist Party. Malcolm X rebuked Hansberry publicly for her interracial marriage. AfterRaisins success made her a de facto spokesperson on African American politics, she openly criticized black leaders who neglected the poor to advance their own careers. The Washington, D.C., office searched her passport files "in an effort to obtain all available background material on the subject, any derogatory information contained therein, and a photograph and complete description," while officers in Milwaukee and Chicago examined her life history. why is ruth angry with Walter. Du Bois, whose office was in the same building, and other Black Pan-Africanists. [16], Additionally, she wrote scripts at Freedom. During her short career Hansberry seemed destined to become an important force in American theater. Hansberry married a white man, Robert Nemiroff. In doing so, he blocked access to all materials related to Hansberry's lesbianism, meaning that no scholars or biographers had access for more than 50 years. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Lewis, Jone Johnson. [8] Carl died in 1946 when Lorraine was fifteen years old; "American racism helped kill him," she later said.[9]. This made her the first Chicago native to be honored along the North Halsted corridor. They took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Her father founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for blacks in Chicago, and ran a successful real estate business. Consulting her unpublished writings and diaries as well as her published work, Perry recovers this more radical side. Remaining active in the civil rights movement, Hansberry began a relationship with Dorothy Secules, a tenant, and the two remained together until Hansberry's premature death from cancer in January 1965. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. She expressed a desire for a future in which "Nobody fights. There ain't nothing as precious to me.There ain't nothing worth holding on to, money, dreams, nothing else--". Analysis. "In an article titled 'Kenya's Kikuyu: A Peaceful People Wage Heroic Struggle against the British,' Hansberry presented an opposite view and applauded the Kikuyu for 'helping to set fire to British Imperialism in Kenya.' Hansberry was born in Chicago in 1930, to parents whose wealth and social status helped buffer their family in her early years from the full brunt of the Depression. In this lesson, students will consider what life in America was like prior to Roe v. Wade. Walter is an African American man that is stuck in a cycle of getting nothing done, but wants to get out of it with his own ambitious business ideas. Many of her mentors were attacked for being Communists, but Hansberry escaped this persecution because she was relatively unknown. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. "[55], Hansberry was a critic of existentialism, which she considered too distant from the world's economic and geopolitical realities. Though she was an internationalist, and something of a Black nationalist, a Marxist, and a socialist, she was also deeply American. Her critique of capitalist and racist America stemmed from a deep attachment to the culture and people who felt its violence. The "primary feature" of the room is its atmosphere of having accommodated "the living of too many people for too many years.". Lorraine Hansberry: Art of Thunder, Vision of Light (Freedomways, 1979). [8], She worked on Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party presidential campaign in 1948, despite her mother's disapproval. [35][36], Mumford stated that Hansberry's lesbianism caused her to feel isolated while A Raisin in the Sun catapulted her to fame; still, 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. The fascinating facts about Lorraine Hansberry following illustrate her development as a Black woman, activist, and writer. "No sooner had she joined Freedom, which had been founded by Paul Robeson as part of his tightening embrace of the Communist Party line in the increasingly frigid Cold War than she was serving as a participant-correspondent: she accompanied the 'Sojourners for Truth and Justice,' a group of 132 black women from 15 states which was convened in September 1951, in Washington by the long-time activist Mary Church Terrell 'to demand that the Federal Government protect the lives and liberties' of black Americans. This is her earliest remaining theatrical work. She was the first Black playwright and youngest American to win a New York Critics Circle award. It was also a critique of employment discrimination, Northern white racism, and American poverty. Although critical reception was cool, supporters kept it running until Lorraine Hansberry's death in January. It seems, in fact, that, as with her dear friend the author James Baldwin, Hansberry is having a curiously vibrant renaissance some 54 years after her death, at the age of thirty-four from pancreatic cancer, on January 12, 1965. A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) was their first incubator and in 2012 they became an independent organization. As Alan Wald argues inAmerican Night: The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War, these figures have been neglected because the anti-communist hysteria of the mid-20th century enforced forgetting of the black and white leftists who were unsatisfied by the eras liberalism and sought to better the conditions of the poor. The very foundations of American democracy needed to be transformed. The Hansberrys were a proud middle class family, who valued social and political involvement. In 1952, as the movement entered its pivotal years andBrown v. Board of Educationwent before the Supreme Court, Hansberry grew increasingly interested in what was happening abroad. Within two months, they were fundraising together. The documentary Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart is the first in-depth presentation of Hansberry's complex life, using her personal papers and archives, including home movies and . She joined the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization, and wrote a letter to its publication arguing that sexism and anti-queer oppression sprang from the same source and that combating one required combating the other. because he wont get up out of bed and get a shower. But even more important was how the radical play was received: Americas mainstream (and often conservative) theater critics applauded it. A Raisin in the Sunis often understood as the story of a black family fighting racist housing discrimination to purchase a home in a white neighborhood. As a playwright, feminist, and racial justice activist, Hansberry never shied away from tough topics during her short and extraordinary life. Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and author. She died at her home in Monroe, Connecticut. Summary. Children see things very well sometimes and idealists even better. Princeton, NJ 08544, We cannot accommodate requests to reach Faculty Emeriti or Advisory Council members, 2023 The Trustees of Princeton University, Reflections on African American Studies Lectures, The Good of All: Lorraine Hansberry's radical imagination. During this time, she generated support for the Student Non-Violent Coordination Committee (SNCC), which aimed to end segregation in the south, and spoke out against the House Un-American Activities Committee. She first Black woman to have a play staged on Broadway. Later, an FBI reviewer of Raisin in the Sun highlighted its Pan-Africanist themes as "dangerous". Eddie Fisher had a hit with his version of "Cindy Oh Cindy." Hansberry, "The Egyptian People Fight for Freedom", quoted in Higashida, Maxwell, William J. Had she lived longer, she would likely have been both a black power nationalist and an anti-colonial internationalist.