Lorraine Hansberry: Playwright
Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – Jan. 12, 1965), born 93 years ago this month, was a feminist, civil rights activist, writer and playwright whose play, A Raisin in the Sun, changed American theater. Her work remains relevant even today. Hansberry’s final play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, is in revival on Broadway this summer.
In her brief life, Lorraine Hansberry wrote only five plays about the African American experience, but the power in those works had an outsized impact on the culture and history of the civil rights generation. She drew from her own life experience to present an uncompromising perspective of the struggles of post-World War II urban Black Americans.
When A Raisin in the Sun hit Broadway in March 1959 there had been nothing like it before. It told the story of three generations of the Youngers, a working class African American family in Chicago, whose patriarch’s death and subsequent life insurance payment presented a windfall, opportunities, and conflicts. The cast included future stars Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Louis Gossett, Jr. and Claudia McNeil on stage at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City.
Now considered an iconic piece of classic theater, A Raisin in The Sun debuted at the height of segregation in America. It would be five more years before the Civil Rights Act would be signed into law officially outlawing segregation. Would a play on Broadway that spoke directly to the plight of African Americans succeed or fail?
In fact, the play made theater history. It was the first Broadway play by an African American woman and the first play with an African American director, Lloyd RIchards. It premiered to critical acclaim and later that year, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play. It was Hansberry’s first play to be produced and at 29, she became the youngest playwright to win the award. The following year, it swept the Tonys with four nominations for best direction, best play and best performances for actor and actress.
With 530 performances over 19 months, it not only mesmerized traditional theatergoers, but attracted a new group to Broadway: Black Americans. Novelist James Baldwin wrote, “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of Black people's lives been seen on the stage. Black people had ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.”
The title was inspired by a short Langston Hughes poem called Harlem.
“What happens to a dream deferred,” the poem opens. “Does it dry up like/like a raisin in the sun?/ Or does it fester like a sore--/and then run?” Hansberry said she hoped the play “would help a lot of people understand how we are just as complicated as they are.”
Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, the last of Nannie and Carl Hansberry’s four children. Nannie was a schoolteacher and Carl, a businessman who founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for Blacks in the city. He was also a real estate developer and speculator at a time when racist housing laws were sources of misery and restrictions for African Americans. Known as “the kitchenette king,” he created more units by adding small kitchens after dividing larger apartments into two.
The Hansberrys and their extended family were well educated and prominent members of the city’s African American community as well as activists with their local NAACP and Urban League chapters. Hansberry’s uncle, William Leo Hansberry, would become a prominent professor of History at Howard University.
Her cousin, Shauneille Perry, would later become one of the first female directors on off-Broadway. The family home was also a place where African American celebrities like Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington and Jesse Owens often visited. Conversations covered a mix of music and culture as well as debating ideas for protests and organizing civil rights events. All of it would become rich material for Hansberry’s literary career.
In 1937, Hansberry’s father purchased a house at 6140 Rhodes Avenue, a brick, three-flat apartment building in a white neighborhood south of the University of Chicago. On the evening the family moved in, the threats and violence began. As they were sitting in their living room, a brick crashed through the window. Eight-year-old Lorraine narrowly missed getting hit in the head. That night and for many after, her mother would be up “patrolling the house with a loaded German Luger.”
As a real estate broker, Hansberry’s father knew the house was under a racially restrictive covenant that stated only whites could purchase the property. Covenants were not only common but legal in many cities until 1948 and they kept African Americans in residential segregation.
Six days later, a neighbor sued to have the Hansberrys evicted. The case went to court. The Circuit and Illinois Supreme Courts ruled that the contracts were legal and that the Hansberrys had to move. But Carl Hansberry was determined and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1940, three years after he purchased the Rhodes Avenue house, the Court decided in Hansberry’s favor. He won, but the victory was based on a technicality. For the covenant to be enforceable, 95% of the property owners had to sign it. Only 54% did, making the covenant invalid.
Even though the case did not outlaw covenants, Hansberry v. Lee became a landmark case in the fight for fair housing. It made available hundreds of properties in white neighborhoods and paved the way for the end of racist covenants. It also inspired A Raisin in The Sun, where Lena Younger decides to use part of her husband’s insurance to move into a better, white neighborhood.
Lorraine Hansberry’s plays also were influenced by her time as a writer for Freedom, a Harlem based leftist newspaper run by singer-athlete-activist Paul Robeson. Her political views on race, politics and feminism were radicalized by the stories she covered and the people she met.
In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, a white, Jewish writer who shared her political views. Even though interracial marriage was legal in Illinois where they married, it was rare in New York City where they lived. It lasted nine years, ending when Hansberry began dating other women and began identifying as a lesbian. Although she became more open about her sexual life, she remained in the closet until her death partly because homosexuality was still illegal.
Nemiroff and Hansberry remained close friends for the rest of her life and as her literary executor, he championed her legacy. He adapted her writings and notes into a play about her life. “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” became one of the longest running off-Broadway plays in 1968-1969. It spawned a successful autobiography and a hit song written by singer Nina Simone that charted on the R& B and Hot 100 lists in 1970.
Once she became a celebrity, Hansberry used her status to help the Black Power movement and civil rights organizations. Black Americans, she wrote needed to use every tool possible “…legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent…they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.”
Hansberry also helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and was part of a small group of leading activists who met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy about the need for the federal government to act on race relations. In June 1963, a month after the meeting, President John Kennedy proposed legislation that would become the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In the 64 years since its premiere, Raisin in The Sun has had many lives as two movies, a television special, a Broadway musical (“Raisin”) and a radio play. It has been revived twice on Broadway. The 2004 version starred Sean Combs and Audra McDonald. The 2014 version with Denzel Washington and Sophie Okonedo won three Tony Awards
Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer in 1965.
©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project