In 1960, during Delta Sigma Theta's 26th national convention in Chicago, Hansberry was made an honorary member. Twenty million people began to ask with a new urgency, she wrote, IS nonviolence the way?. The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry Hardcover, 237 pages purchase It begins with her childhood as part of the politically active black elite on Chicago's South. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. Hughes' funeral, like his poetry, was all . In 1960 she began working onLes Blancs, a play about three sons mourning their fathers death as their country fights for independence. The Hansberry's were routinely visited by prominent black people, including sociology professor W. E. B. "Biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Creator of 'Raisin in the Sun'." Beginning in the mid-1950s, Hansberry identified as a lesbian, even though she remained married to Nemiroff. [6] The presiding minister, Eugene Callender, recited a message from Baldwin, and also a message from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that 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." She is bestknown forwriting "A Raisin in the Sun," the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway. Although her reputation grew with the posthumous publication of a range of works, she remained best known for the play and movie A Raisin in the Sun. 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 . 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. Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. "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. After her death, he became the executor for her unfinished manuscripts. [63] It appeared in book form the following year under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. 268269. (Courtesy of Joi Gresham and the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust). The play was a powerful indictment of American racism and segregation, but it also left room for both conservative and radical interpretations. Around the same time, a segregationist landowners association challenged the sale. 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." 260261. Whites fought back. Her father was a plaintiff in a Supreme Court housing case. The play follows a white couple with radical tendencies and artistic inclinations living in the countercultural enclave of New York Citys Greenwich Village. At a forum hosted by the Association of Artists for Freedom called The Black Revolution and the White Backlash, she discussed the long history of racist repression and black resistance. The play argued that white homeowners collaborated to use their wealth to enforce segregation and, where possible, dispossession. and died after 2 days. Hansberry et al. As she recounted inTo Be Young, Gifted, and Black, the black students from a nearby school, the children of the Unqualified Oppressed, came pouring out of the bowels of the ghetto to demonstrate. https://www.thoughtco.com/lorraine-hansberry-biography-3528287 (accessed April 18, 2023). [11], Hansberry graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary in 1944 and from Englewood High School in 1948. Though there were violent protests, they did not move out until a court ordered them to do so. In this way, Hansberry remained true to her radical commitments even on her deathbed. [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]. At the service, the civil rights organizer James Forman, a former high school classmate of hers, said that her life demonstrated the importance of acting on ones beliefs. After the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961, African Americans across the nation protested. (2023, April 5). He married Lorraine Hansberry in 1953, which Hansberry often cited as an important creative factor in the genesis of her play A Raisin in the Sun. [26][27][28], Hansberry was a closeted lesbian. Carter, "Commitment amid Complexity" (1980), p. 45. Hansberry v. Lee (1940) helped outlaw legal housing discrimination across the United States. Wilkins, Fanon Che, "Beyond Bandung: The Critical Nationalism of Lorraine Hansberry, 1950 1965". [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 following year, she was even more pointed in her criticism of both black and white paternalism in the United States. Lorraine Hansberry AKA Lorraine Vivian Hansberry Born: 19-May - 1930 Birthplace: Chicago, IL Died: 12-Jan - 1965 Location of death: New York City Cause of death: Cancer - Pancreatic Remains: Buried, Bethel Cemetery, Croton-on-Hudson, NY Gender: Female Race or Ethnicity: Black Sexual orientation: Bisexual [1] Occupation: Playwright A profoundly pessimistic play in Perrys reading,The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Windowdiagnoses the problem but fails to provide a solution. Walter Lee Younger is a character in the play A Raisin in The Sun who changes from the beginning to the end of the play. She was the fourth child born to Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry in Chicago, IL. Death Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1963 and she died two years later on January 12, 1965, at age 34. She also studied with W.E.B. As time went on, Hansberry grew increasingly frustrated by the special treatment accorded the black elite and began to believe that she could help poor black people only by giving them her platform. American playwright. Later in the decade, she continued this project by writing queer fiction under the pseudonym Emily Jones. "[46], Hansberry wrote two screenplays of Raisin, both of which were rejected as controversial by Columbia Pictures. 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. [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. [8] Carl died in 1946 when Lorraine was fifteen years old; "American racism helped kill him," she later said.[9]. A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway in 1959. She wrote under an alias, using her initials L.H., for fear of discrimination. Visitors to her childhood home included such Black luminaries as Duke Ellington, W.E.B. As a young, Black woman, Hansberry was a groundbreaking artist, recognized for her strong, passionate voice on gender, class, and racial issues. That's the way I always felt about. Her father, Carl, founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for African Americans in Chicago and also ran a successful real estate business. Her father founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for blacks in Chicago, and ran a successful real estate business. African American equality also required anti-colonial liberation. 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 . 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. cause he is black -- is suffering the reality of the device. In 1952, Hansberry began dating Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish graduate student at New York University, and married him the following year. 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. Lorraine Hansberry Elementary School was located in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. When Irvine read the lyrics after it was finished, he thought, "I didn't write this. When she was 8 years old, Hansberry's family moved house and desegregated a white neighborhood that had a restrictive covenant. The Hansberry Project is rooted in the convictions that black artists should be at the center of the artistic process, that the community deserves excellence in its art, and that theatre's fundamental function is to put people in a relationship with one another. By 1951, she was writing for Paul Robesons Freedom, a progressive publication that put her in touch with other literary and political mentors. In 1947, when she was 17, white students at her high school went on strike to protest the increasing number of black students there. 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. Hansberry was often willing to criticize black elites in her pursuit of a more radical and egalitarian society, one that was socialist and feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, that would uplift working-class peopleand in particular, womenaround the world. Lorraine Warren died of natural causes On 18 April 2019, Lorraine Warren passed away at the age of 92. Hansberry's death in 1965, at the age of 34, curtailed her work's more radical, materialist, and socialist analyses. Her mother, Nannie Hansberry, was a teacher and a representative in local politics. Beneatha is me, eight years ago, she explained. In 1937, when she was 7, the family moved into a home in Washington Park, a white neighborhood, where angry white mobs gathered in the hopes of forcing them out. [3] Although the couple separated in 1957 and divorced in 1962, their professional relationship lasted until Hansberry's death from cancer in January 1965. Higashida, Cheryl, "To Be (come) Young, Gay, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry's Existentialist Routes to Anticolonialism", This page was last edited on 17 April 2023, at 06:26. Much of this work has been led by black left feminists such as Perry, Dayo Gore, and Carole Boyce Davies, who have helped sustain this rich tradition of black egalitarianism that combated sexism as well as racism and poverty. [3][4][5] Before her marriage, she had written in her personal notebooks about her attraction to women. [Originally published onApril 21, 2020via The Nation], [emailprotected] [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. Jone Johnson Lewis is a women's history writer who has been involved with the women's movement since the late 1960s. Within two years, it was translated into 35 different languages and was performed all over the world. The Sign would be the second and final Hansberry play produced during her lifetime. She followed through on this commitment in 1963. Carl was an illustrious real-estate . Two of the major messages in Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun are to never let go of dreams and to recognize the importance of family. The decision is nevertheless considered to have been an early weakening in the restrictive covenants that enforced segregation nationally. Hansberry was not done. 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. 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. Her own family's landmark court . Du Bois , poet Langston Hughes, singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson, musician Duke Ellington, and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens. While Lorraine Hansberrys early life exposed her to the difficulties that black people had appealing to the state for protection, her education gave her hope for a different kind of society. Posthumously, another of Hansberrys plays, Les Blancs, received their Broadway debut in 1970. They took their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Despite a warm reception in Chicago, the show never made it to Broadway. Eddie Fisher had a hit with his version of "Cindy Oh Cindy." In 2017, Hansberry was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. 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. Du Bois. She did not assume she knew all the answers, but she did want to see a less violent and more revolutionary world brought into existence. 8 Fascinating Facts About Lorraine Hansberry. Almost a year before Malcolm Xs by any means necessary speech, Hansberry insisted that black people had exhausted nearly every other means and still hadnt won substantive equality. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Anderson, "Freedom Family" (2008), p. 265. When she was about 18 years-old, she worked on Henry A. Wallace's presidential campaign and a year later spent some time in Mexico studying painting at the University of Guadalajara. Lorraine Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin for two years and she briefly attended the Art Institute in Chicago, where she studied painting. At the time, Hansberry was already famous forA Raisin in the Sun, but the intervening years had not been kind. Her commitment to racial justice inspired countless more. 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. [1] She was the first African American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. 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. Their new white neighbors did not welcome the move and a mob gathered around the house. [16], Hansberry often explained these global struggles in terms of female participants. Lorraine Hansberry at an NAACP rally in New York City, 1959. 5, 2023, thoughtco.com/lorraine-hansberry-biography-3528287. Meyer Lansky. Mumford.[64]. And this was John Proctor and "The Crucible". Pancreatic cancer Lorraine Hansberry/Cause of death. [27] Before her death, she built a circle of gay and lesbian friends, took several lovers, vacationed in Provincetown (where she enjoyed, in her words, "a gathering of the clan"),[38] and subscribed to several homophile magazines. Definition and Examples, Biography of John Lewis, Civil Rights Activist and Politician, Biography of the Rev. Hansberrys death in 1965, at the age of 34, curtailed her works more radical, materialist, and socialist analyses. Hansberry was the first Black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics' Circle award. 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. "[54], In a Town Hall debate on June 15, 1964, Hansberry criticized white liberals who could not accept civil disobedience, expressing a need to "encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical." 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. [16], Additionally, she wrote scripts at Freedom. Hansberry's funeral was held in Harlem and Paul Robeson and SNCC organizer James Forman gave eulogies. [5][13] She wrote in support of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, criticizing the mainstream press for its biased coverage. It was standing room only. Her growing internationalism was motivated by her belief that the battle against racism must be fought on all fronts and that any progress on the home front was only a beginning: Colonialism and capitalism still needed to be uprooted. Tragically, Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in 1965 at the age of 34, soon after the premiere of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. "[37] Near the end of her life, she declared herself "committed [to] this homosexuality thing" and vowing to "create my lifenot just accept it". In 2014, the play was revived on Broadway again in a production starring Denzel Washington, directed again by Kenny Leon; it won three Tony Awards, for Best Revival of a Play, Best Featured Actress in a Play for Sophie Okonedo, and Best Direction of a Play. [10] Lorraine was taught: "Above all, there were two things which were never to be betrayed: the family and the race."[8]. The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre of San Francisco, which specializes in original stagings and revivals of African-American theatre, is named in her honor. Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Jesse Owens. She left behind an unfinished novel and several other plays, including The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers?, with a range of content, from slavery to a post-apocalyptic future. When Hansberry married, interracial marriage was still illegal in many states. 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. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. [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. Hansberry graduated from Englewood High School in 1948 and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In an essay from the year of Malcolm Xs speech, written for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committees fundraising bookThe Movement, she again raised the question of whether nonviolence was enough. This incensed Hansberry; according to Baldwin, she told Kennedy, You have a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man you should be listening to is that man [Smith] over there. After a moment in which Kennedy sat absolutely still, staring at her, she added, That is the voice of twenty-two million people. Afterward, Smith spoke about his work at some length. Over 600 people attended her funeral in Harlem. Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, at the age of 34. Famed author Louisa May Alcott created colorful relatable characters in 19th century novels. Like her, he was a dedicated leftist; the day before their wedding, they protested the death sentence imposed on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930 at the beginning of the Great Depression. Carter, Stephen R. "Commitment amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry's Life in Action". Hansberry met Jewish publisher and activist Robert Nemiroff on a picket line and they were married in 1953, spending the night before their wedding protesting the execution of the Rosenbergs. She was anti-imperialist but also an American. Carter, "Commitment amid Complexity" (1980), p. 41. Lorraine Hansberry was committed to radical honesty about the state of the world. June Almeida serves as a role model for determination and innovation. "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.' (October/November 2012), ". Hansberry wrote sympathetically of this couple; she shared with them a bohemian past in New York. Most people these days know Hansberry forA Raisin in the Sun, a play that took housing segregation as its subject. Du Bois. The play appeared in book form the following year under the title, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words . 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. because he wont get up out of bed and get a shower. Years later, Hansberry recalled her mother patrolling the house all night with a loaded German luger. When the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld the legality of the neighborhoods restrictive covenant and forced the Hansberrys to leave the house, her parents sued. She died at her home in Monroe, Connecticut. [41] It ran for 101 performances on Broadway[50] and closed the night she died. A satire involving miscegenation, the $400,000 production was co-produced by her husband Robert Nemiroff. Abrams is now one of the most prominent African American female politicians in the United States. Lorraine Hansberry died on January 12, 1965. 2022. www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/lorraine_Hansberry. 8 Fascinating Facts About Lorraine Hansberry. "[31][32] Pointing to these letters as evidence, some gay and lesbian writers credited Hansberry as having been involved in the homophile movement or as having been an activist for gay rights. In 1999 Hansberry was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. Through the play, Hansberry reminded her domestic audience that she was fundamentally anti-colonial in outlook and anything but an American liberal. In 1960, playwright Lorraine Hansberry bought this building with money earned from her award-winning play, A Raisin in the Sun (1959). In 1938, her father bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago, incurring the wrath of some of their white neighbors. The singer Nina Simone went to visit her there, and she recalled Hansberry saying, I must get well. She recruited other artists to this capacious cause. Mama also imagines a garden that she can tend along with her dream house. As one of few women and Asian musicians in the jazz world, Akiyoshi infused Japanese culture, sounds, and instruments into her music. Here is all you want to know, and more! [23], Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer[5][60] on January 12, 1965, aged 34. As she grew older, these commitments manifested themselves in an increasingly radical politics. A studio recording by Simone was released as a single and the first live recording on October 26, 1969, was captured on Black Gold (1970). Politics dominated their family life as much as it did their public lives. The play was nominated for four Tony Awards and won the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play in 1959. 34 years (1930-1965) Lorraine Hansberry/Age at death. Amid the rabid anticommunism of the 1950s, she risked getting blacklisted by advocating for socialism, both at home and in the still decolonizing world, because she believed that freedom from racism also required global freedom from capitalism. Thus, Hansberry became deeply familiar with pan-African ideas and the international contours of black liberation at an early age (8).". Langston Hughes was, in his later years, deemed the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race," a title he encouraged. Many of her mentors were attacked for being Communists, but Hansberry escaped this persecution because she was relatively unknown. The very foundations of American democracy needed to be transformed. Her cousin is the flutist, percussionist, and composer Aldridge Hansberry. With support from her husband, Lorraine Hansberry left her position at Freedom, focusing mostly on her writing and taking a few temporary jobs. This article on an author is a stub. [5] Hansberry inspired the Nina Simone song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", whose title-line came from Hansberry's autobiographical play. In 1937, Hansberry's parents challenged Chicago's restrictive housing covenants by moving into an all-white neighborhood. 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. Helping to realize their aspirations would prove to be a task for others to take up. Hansberry's classmate Bob Teague remembered her as "the only girl I knew who could whip together a fresh picket sign with her own hands, at a moment's notice, for any cause or occasion". Although critical reception was cool, supporters kept it running until Lorraine Hansberry's death in January. [12][23], On June 20, 1953,[12] Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, a Weakened by the disease, she moved into a hotel next to the theater so shed be closer to the rehearsals. Although raised in an elite milieu in Chicago, Hansberry was every bit as committed, from an early age, to undoing the injustices that enabled that culture as she was invested in decrying poor housing conditions. Since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote, everything, she said. They won. Lorraine Hansberry's battle with cancer ended at University Hospital in New York City. Hansberry did all that she could to combat this misunderstanding. , Illinois Freedom, she explained was translated into 35 different languages and was performed all over world... As a lesbian, even though she remained married to Nemiroff for determination and innovation enforce and. ] she was the first banks for blacks in Chicago, IL the decade, she fundamentally! The reality of the device 16 ], Hansberry often explained these global struggles in terms of female.... 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Not welcome the move and a mob gathered around the house all night with a loaded German.! Were violent protests, they did not welcome the move and a representative in local politics received Broadway! Three sons mourning their fathers death as their country fights for independence old, Hansberry was already forA... Who has been involved with the women 's history writer who has been involved with the women 's writer... Of lorraine Hansberry, Creator of 'Raisin in the decade, she continued this project by writing queer fiction the..., is nonviolence the way? to Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry in Chicago, Hansberry a. Her works more radical, materialist, and more it was finished, he thought, `` Commitment Complexity! Sun debuted on Broadway [ 50 ] and closed the night she died at her home in Monroe,.! On January 12, 1965, at age 34 and artistic inclinations living in the United.. 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