“Serious drama – drama that has at least the objective of making a larger statement about life, I think sooner or later has to become involved in its time.”
TRQ: Lorraine Hansberry, Born May 19, 1930
Playwright and writer Lorraine Hansberry, most known for her play A Raisin in the Sun, was born in Chicago, Illinois. The daughter of a real estate broker, Lorraine grew up in an all-white neighborhood where her family constantly dealt with overt racism and attempts to force them to move. The resulting legal battle would take the family’s case all the way to the Supreme Court, and impact Hansberry’s later work.
When she was 20 years old, Hansberry moved to New York and began working at the Freedom Newspaper. Her political activism introduced her cultural leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson.
In 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, fellow activist and writer. After moving to Greenwich Village, she joined The Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization, and contributed letters to their publication, The Ladder. She identified herself as a “heterosexually married lesbian.” She described her own homosexuality as something she both liked and disliked.
In 1957 Hansberry finished writing the play A Raisin in the Sun, in which she uses the power of storytelling to inform the reader and the audience on issues of race. She and had also separated from Nemiroff by 1957, and started dating women. She did so discreetly, and Nemiroff would later actively take steps to limit access to materials that revealed her sexuality. However, Hansberry worked to fight against separatist notions, and understood the need to address the civil rights of gays and lesbians. She recognised that the “most splendid argument is simple and to the point, Ralph Bunche, with all his clean fingernails, degrees, and, of course, undeniable service to the human race, could still be insulted, denied a hotel room or meal in many parts of our country.”
In 1959, the play opened on Broadway, the first written by a black woman or directed by a black director. Hansberry became youngest woman and the first black woman to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. She soon set about writing the screen play to adapt the play to film.
Within a few years, Hansberry was diagnosed with cancer. She continued writing and her activism, at one point accepting James Baldwin’s invitation to converse with Robert Kennedy about race relations and civil rights. She finished writing The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, and the play opened on Broadway in 1964.
A black lesbian artist, Hansberry found no wholly inclusive community that would accept her. Materials that later emerged revealed that Hansberry’s journals were filled with descriptions of lesbian desires and encounters. She corresponded with many women with whom she had sexual relationships. At the same time, she had learned to accept a certain loneliness with an identity that was marginalised in many ways.
On January 12, 1965, at the young age of 34, Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer. Her funeral was held in Harlem, and a message from Martin Luther King, Jr was 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.”
In 1969 Nina Simone released her song, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” named after Hansberry’s autobiography and in memory of her. In 1999, Hansberry was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. In 2013 Hansberry was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
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