Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1905). Biography and Creativity

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, to Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry, on May 19, 1930. The youngest of four children, she had an older sister, Mamie, and two older brothers, Carl, Jr., and Perry. The Hansberrys were both educated, cultured southern natives. A former schoolteacher, her mother met her father while working at his Lake Street Bank. By the time Lorraine was born, seven years after her youngest sibling, Mr. Hansberry was a prominent businessman who maintained and rented several properties on Chicago’s South Side.

The Hansberrys taught their children to value family and their cultural heritage above all else. Their dinner table was a place of political and social discussion. Her parents encouraged the children to develop their own opinions about political, social, and cultural events and present them intelligently. Hansberry was doubtlessly influenced by many of her family’s dinner guests, among them the poet Langston Hughes, the well-known actor/singer Paul Robeson, the musical legend Duke Ellington, the sociologist/political activist/writer W. E. B. DuBois, the director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Walter White, the Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens, and her uncle, Leo Hansberry, one of the first scholars of African antiquity and history and a professor at Howard University.

Hanberry’s political sensitivity developed at a defining moment in 1935, when, at the age of five, her parents gave her a white fur coat, hat, and muff for Christmas. Although the Hansberrys were a middle-class family, it was the middle of the depression and such a luxurious gift seemed extravagant even to a young girl. After winter break her parents insisted she wear the gift to school—a school filled with classmates whose parents were struggling to find work and put food on the table. She was ridiculed and even beaten. Those moments of shame and alienation served as the inspiration for one of her first stories and molded her into the woman she later became.

To understand Hansberry it is important to know about the period in which she was born. In the 1930s and 1940s black families were victims of segregation regardless of their social status. Jim Crow laws in the South forced African Americans to drink from separate water fountains and sit in the back of buses. From 1916 to 1948 racially restrictive laws called covenants gave white property owners a legal right not to sell based only on the buyer’s race, thereby creating an area known as the “Black Belt” on Chicago’s South Side.

Carl Hansberry, helped by NAACP lawyers and white realtors, discovered a loophole in the covenant of one all-white neighborhood. In 1937, he secretly bought two pieces of property. When the family moved into their home on Rhodes Avenue, the neighborhood responded violently, making it clear that the Hansberrys were not wanted. Hans- berry was outside playing when a neighborhood mob began to amass. As she and her family gathered in the front room, a brick flew through the front window, barely missing Lorraine’s head. Family friends soon arrived to help guard the house through the night. It was not until a friend went onto the porch with a shotgun that the mob dispersed (McKissack 25). Another pivotal moment in Lorraine’s life, it would later inspire her most well-known work, A Raisin in the Sun.

Hansberry attended Englewood High School, where she excelled in English and history. She was inspired by her English teacher, Kathleen Rigby— dubbed “Pale Hecate”—who loved Shakespeare and challenged her students to live up to their potential. An awkward and overweight adolescent, Hansberry spent most of her time in her room writing poetry. In 1944 she won her first writing prize, for a short story about football. That fall, on a chaperoned date, she saw her first play, Dark of the Moon, a “folk musical.” Interested in the theater, she then attended both The Tempest and Othello, which featured her family friend Paul Robeson, who was at the pinnacle of his popularity. By spring 1945, Lorraine, aged 15, vowed to write a play herself (Cheney 8).

That summer her father bought a home in Palanco, Mexico, a suburb of Mexico City. He had been struggling with high blood pressure, possibly the result of the stress due to his various antiracist lawsuits, and hoped that the change would improve his health. His health improved temporarily, but in 1946, shortly before her 16th birthday, Hansberry’s father died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Later, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Hansberry asserted that her father’s struggles against racism killed him. Back in Chicago, she was elected president of the high school debate society. Her father’s work with the NAACP lawyers against racial covenants, her Uncle Leo’s studies of ancient and modern Africa, and black students’ resistance to racial discrimination had a powerful impact on Hansberry.

After graduating from Englewood High School in January 1948, she entered the University of Wisconsin, where she studied art, geology, stage design, and English. Politically active, she worked on Henry Wallace’s campaign and became the chair of the Young Progressives of America. In February 1950, she left the university; that fall, despite the protests and warnings of her mother, she moved to New York City.

In New York she continued her political activism, writing for Young Progressives of America magazine and attending classes at the New School for Social Research, where she learned about Marcus Garvey. A black nationalist and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Garvey, a pan-Africanist, advocated the back-to-Africa movement. A leader during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, he expressed ideas about racial pride and nobility that inspired many writers, politicians, and artists, as well as Hansberry and several of her contemporaries of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

Hansberry’s first full-time job as a paid writer and editor began in 1951, when she was hired by Paul Robeson to work for his Harlem newspaper Freedom. She wrote a series of articles on communism, black history, and homosexuality. On a picket line at New York University (NYU) protesting the exclusion of blacks from the NYU basketball team, she met Robert Nemiroff. They began to date; Hansberry soon took the white Jewish boy home to meet her family. The family was concerned for the safety of the interracial couple, but as it was obvious they were in love, the family approved. The evening before the wedding, the couple spent the day at a protest against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Hansberry and Nemiroff were married on June 20, 1953, at her mother’s home in Chicago.

Hansberry and Nemiroff were committed to art and politics; in their Greenwich Village apartment they entertained long into the night, discussing current events, plays, and films. After the wedding, Hansberry quit her job as associate editor for Freedom but continued to write freelance articles. She also studied African history under her family friend W. E. B. DuBois and taught black literature at Jefferson School of Social Science. Then, in May 1954, she wrote the script for the second Harlem rally, Pulse of the Peoples: A Cultural Salute to Paul Robeson.

In 1956, Nemiroff, then working in publishing, wrote the hit song “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” the success of which allowed Hansberry to quit working and focus on her writing full time. The result was her most critically important work, A Raisin in the Sun. She completed the first draft in 1957 and read it to a friend, the music publisher Philip Rose, one night at dinner. He immediately liked the script and optioned the play for Broadway. A play focused on a black family, concerned with black issues, and written by a black woman was an anomaly in 1957. Most investors and theaters were not willing to take the risk; however, for the next year Rose looked tirelessly, exhausting all resources before finally convincing Harry Belafonte and other black cultural leaders to invest small amounts in a production of the play (Cheney 25).

In January and February 1959 auditions were held for A Raisin in the Sun in New Haven, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Hansberry’s friend Sidney Poitier was cast as the lead, Walter Lee Younger. As director he suggested Lloyd Richards. Directing jobs for black directors were scarce in the 1950s, and Richards, a Broadway actor and up-and-coming director, leaped at the opportunity to work on the play despite the fact that it was written by an unknown playwright (McKissack 73).

No New York theater would produce the show, so Rose and his coproducer David Cogan arranged for performances in New Haven and Philadelphia. Great reviews prompted the Schuberts to move the play to Hansberry’s hometown of Chicago and then to Broadway as soon as a theater opened up. A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway at the Barrymore Theater on March 11, 1959. It was acclaimed by audiences and critics alike. Competing against plays written by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and Archibald MacLeish, A Raisin in the Sun won the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. At just 29 years old, Lorraine Hansberry was the first African American, the youngest playwright, and only the fifth woman to win the coveted prize. In her acceptance speech she said, “I can not adequately tell you what recognition and tribute mean to the young writer. . . . One works, one dreams, and, if one is lucky, one actually produces. But true fulfillment only comes when our fellows say: ‘Ah, we understand, we appreciate, we enjoy.’” (McKissack 80).

As with many plays that deal with complex social issues, A Raisin in the Sun caused controversy. Some critics argued that the themes were so universal that the family might as well have been white—a claim that Hansberry vehemently disputed—while others felt that the play was too centered on the black experience. Regardless, Hansberry’s career as a writer was established. Later that year, she was commissioned by NBC to write The Drinking Gourd, the first in a series of televised dramas about the Civil War. She chose slavery as her topic, the title based on a spiritual, “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” which communicated information about the Underground Railroad. Her intention was to create an honest portrayal of slavery and debunk the Hollywood myth about happy singing slaves. Although recognizing it as powerful and well written, NBC rejected the script as too controversial. The film was never made.

Her television and film career far from over, she was hired to write the screen adaptation of A Raisin in the Sun. Excited about her play’s reaching a wider audience but nervous about changes the studio might want to make to the script, Hansberry maintained rights to the project. In 1960 she completed the screenplay, and the studio made minimal changes. Shot in Chicago in 1961, A Raisin in the Sun starred Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee and premiered in Chicago to packed houses of both blacks and whites. The film was enormously successful. It was nominated for an Academy Award for best screenplay, and it won an award for Outstanding Human Values at the Cannes Film Festival.

The next two years were prolific for Hansberry. She wrote several new plays—Les Blancs, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (originally titled “The Sign in Jenny Reed’s Window”), What Use Are Flowers?—and several other works that were never produced. She became increasingly involved in politics, writing newspaper editorials, supporting activities of the southern freedom movement, even challenging then-attorney general Robert Kennedy on civil rights policies, and meeting the Black Power movement leader, Malcolm X.

In June 1963, months after moving out of New York City to Croton-on-Hudson, Hansberry was diagnosed with cancer of the duodenum—part of the digestive system. While undergoing two surgeries, she continued her work, writing articles and lecturing. She also wrote captions for The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality, a photojournal documenting the Civil Rights movement. Although she named Robert Nemiroff her literary executor in her will and continued to collaborate with him, the couple obtained a secret Mexican divorce in 1964. Her next play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, opened at the Longacre Theater on October 15, 1964 to mixed reviews. It was the first time a black playwright had written about white characters, and many people felt she had abandoned the black causes most identified with her work.

Hansberry was admitted to University Hospital the day after the play opened; she had lost her sight and had fallen into a coma. Nemiroff struggled to keep the play open, enlisting actors and friends to use time and money to keep the show running. Over the next several weeks, Hansberry improved. She regained her sight and spent the holidays in the hospital surrounded by friends and family. She lost her struggle with cancer on January 12, 1965. That night the curtain closed on The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window after 101 performances. Her funeral was held at a small church in Harlem on January 15, and she was buried in Croton-on-Hudson.

After Hansberry’s death, Nemiroff dedicated himself to her work. In 1969, four years after her death, he published To Be Young Gifted and Black, a collection of her essays. He developed the book into a play, which opened at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. The show toured nationally in 1970-72, reaching a wide and diverse audience and influencing many young writers. Nemiroff completed Les Blancs in 1970 and edited and published a collection of Hansberry’s work, Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, which includes The Drinking Gourd and WhatUse Are Flowers? In 1973, Nemiroff produced Raisin, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, which won a Tony Award for the best Broadway musical.