Black Sis-tory: Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and activist
The year is 1937.
An crowd assembles outside 6140 South Rhodes Avenue, a brown-brick, three-story house in Woodlawn, Chicago, a white, racially restricted neighborhood, hurling threats, insults, and bricks. One brick, thrown through a window, narrowly misses the owner’s eight-year-old daughter.
In an account of the legal challenges faced by Carl Augustus Hansberry, a wealthy, African American real estate developer, who owned the Rhodes Avenue property, attorney John R. Russell explained, “(Carl’s) wife always carried a pistol with her and kept close watch over (their four children). Those children were subjected to open humiliation, and were spat upon, cursed at, and beaten as they walked to and from school every day.”
The Hansberrys were able to move into the house after a prolonged legal battle to test the validity of Woodlawn’s racially restrictive covenant, inserted into property deeds by the all-white homeowners to prevent nonwhites from buying or occupying land. The U.S. Supreme Court had reversed lower courts’ decisions and upheld the sale of the home to the Hansberrys; however, the ruling was based on a legal technicality not the legality of racial covenants.
That young girl near the window was Lorraine Hansberry, who grew up to be an acclaimed playwright, political activist, and author whose now-classic play, A Raisin in the Sun, was inspired by the traumatic events from her childhood as well as the lives of African American families who rented homes from her father.
At age 29, Hansberry was the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. Raisin received four Tony Awards nominations, and in 1959, won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play.
Hansberry’s social and political writings stemmed from familial influences. Her father fought racial discrimination against African Americans in housing and home ownership. Carl and his wife, educator Nannie Louise (Perry), also worked for the NAACP. Her father’s brother, Professor William Leo Hansberry, an Afrocentrist, founded the African Civilization section at Howard University.
According to the National Women’s History Museum, “When prominent African American community members and leaders came through Chicago, they went to the Hansberry’s home. The family hosted W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, and Jesse Owens.”
Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she developed an interest in theater, politics, and anti-colonialism, however, she dropped out in 1950; she went on to study painting in Chicago and in Mexico and eventually moved to New York to take courses at The New School in Greenwich Village.
By 1951, Hansberry had joined the staff of Freedom, Paul Robeson’s Pan-Africanist newspaper. In news articles and editorials, she criticized American media for sensationalizing coverage of the Kikuyu’s “Mau Mau” rebellion in Kenya rather than highlighting their more than 10-year struggle for independence from British imperialism, which deprived them of their tribal land, political governance, and economic opportunity.
During the 1950s’ “Red Scare,” a period of paranoia over Communist subversion in America, Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy conducted hearings and investigations targeting government employees, educators, entertainment workers, and intellectuals. Hansberry, who joined the Communist Party while in college, never faced arrest, passport revocation, or prison, as did other more well-known African American members of the party, including Robeson, Dubois, and Hughes.
Hansberry and Nemiroff
Hansberry met her husband, Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish theater producer and award-winning songwriter during a protest rally at New York University. The couple, who shared similar political views, married on June 20, 1953. (On the night before their wedding, they protested the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of espionage.)
Royalties from Nemiroff’s hit song, Cindy Oh Cindy, allowed Hansberry to quit her job at Freedom, so she began writing Raisin.
The couple separated in 1957 but divorced in 1960. Despite her marriage to Nemiroff, in her private notebooks, Hansberry identified as a lesbian, but she never came “out” as homosexuality was illegal in New York City at the time.
Nemiroff remained Hansberry’s life-long friend and confidant. When she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Nemiroff, along with her close friends--singer and songwriter Nina Simone (who dedicated To Be Young, Gifted, and Black to Hansberry), and author James Baldwin--kept her diagnosis a secret.
Hansberry wrote a second off-Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, which opened in October 1964. Two days after Sign closed, Hansberry died of cancer on January 12, 1965, at age 34.
As the executor for several unfinished manuscripts, Nemiroff completed the play, Les Blanc and adapted many of her writings into the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was the longest-running off-Broadway play of the 1968–69 season.
The following year it appeared as a book titled, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. She also left behind an unfinished novel and several plays, including The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers?
Hansberry’s artistic work reflects her personal convictions and contradictions, her fight against global injustice and racism, and her intercultural and interracial relationships. She said, "The writer is deceived who thinks that he has some other choice. The question is not whether one will make a social statement in one's work—but only what the statement will say."
Graphic: AI-generated image
