Lorraine Vivian Hansberry, was one of the most relevant and famous playwrights of the 20th century. Her work was produced in the context of her struggle for equality and justice in her own life as an African-American woman in the United States, as well as her participation in the civil rights movement. What most people don’t know, and what U.S. history has attempted to erase, is that Lorraine Hansberry was also a leader of the communist youth movement.
Born in Chicago’s south side in 1930, Hansberry, the youngest of four children, grew up in a middle-class family. Her parents were prominent members of the Black community; frequent visitors to her home included leading African-American cultural and literary figures of the time such as W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Jesse Owens, and many others.
When she was eight, her family moved to the suburbs. When they arrived, they found what Hansberry would later describe as a “hellishly hostile white neighborhood.” Her father successfully fought the neighborhood’s covenant, which sought to officially institute discrimination based on race, all the way to the Supreme Court. The ruling, Hansberry vs. Lee, became an important victory during the struggle for civil rights. Meanwhile, Hansberry’s parents sent her to an all-white public school as a protest against segregation. These childhood experiences would serve as the inspiration for her most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun.
In 1948, she left home to study art at University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she soon became involved in a number of progressive student groups. One of these was the Labor Youth League, which was that era’s incarnation of the Young Communist League. She eventually became part of the editorial staff of the LYL’s publication, New Challenge whose motto was: “The Magazine for Young Americans.”
During this same period, she discovered her calling as a writer, inspired in part by the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey. She soon became bored with college, and moved to New York City to pursue “an education of a different kind,” in the city’s political movements. She did still pursue formal education, though: She studied at the New School for Social Research, Roosevelt College, and at the Jefferson School for Social Sciences (a public school run by communists and independent socialists), where she took a seminar on Africa taught by W.E.B. DuBois. This would heighten her awareness about the struggle of African people against colonization, and the connection of all peoples’ struggles.
She found a job with Paul Robeson’s Freedom publication, initially as a secretary, though she quickly moved up to become associate editor.
Around this time she also met Langston Hughes, who would become another major influence on her work. The title of her play, A Raisin in the Sun, comes from Hughes’ poem “A Dream Deferred,” where he had asked, “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, / Or does it explode?” Completed in 1957, the play was celebrated for its insight into everyday black life.
When Hansberry was a college student she had written: “We want to see film about people who live and work like everybody else, but who currently must battle fierce oppression to do so.” Though not a film, at least not then, this is the type of work she created with her drama. In 1959, A Raisin in the Sun opened in Philadelphia and New Haven, Connecticut, followed by Hansberry’s hometown Chicago, where the play is set. It finally moved Broadway, where it was a hit with audiences, running 530 performances. The cast included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and Louis Gossett.
It was the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway, and Hansberry became the first African American, as well as the youngest person, to produce a work that would win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play of the year. The movie adaptation, released in 1961, won Hansberry a special award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Screen Writers’ Guild Award for her screenplay. More recently, it was chosen as one of the 100 most significant works of the twentieth century in a National Theatre poll of playwrights, actors, directors, journalists, and other theater professionals.
Soon after divorcing her husband of four years, Hansberry joined The Daughters of Bilitis, the nation’s first lesbian organization. She contributed to their publication, The Ladder, writing scathing critiques of sexism and homophobia, pointing out their political roots. “Homosexual persecution has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma,” she wrote. Because of aggressive repression of the LGBT community, the publication used only writers’ initials to protect their identities. Her involvement with the early lesbian movement has, only recently, been discovered.
Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at age 34, leaving behind several unfinished plays. Her ex-husband Robert Nemiroff completed and released several of them, including Les Blancs and To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. She also left several more that were never finished, such as an opera about Eighteenth Century Hatian leader Toussaint L’Overture. Although Hansberry’s life was tragically short, she left behind a tremendous legacy as a writer and as an activist. To her, as with her mentor Paul Robeson, these two endeavors were necessarily linked.
In her life Hansberry had declared that “All art is ultimately social: that which agitates and that which prepares the mind for slumber,” and even today her writings succeed in agitating and raising awareness.
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