Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry was born May 19, 1930, at Provident Hospital on Chicago's South Side, the youngest of four children of real estate broker Carl Hansberry and schoolteacher Nannie Perry. In 1938 Carl bought a house on a white-restricted block of Washington Park and moved the family in anyway, a decision that produced Hansberry v. Lee, the housing-covenant case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940. The family won, but a mob had already thrown a concrete slab through a window with Lorraine inside, and Carl died embittered, of a cerebral hemorrhage, in 1946. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Paul Robeson had all passed through the Hansberry living room by then. She left the University of Wisconsin without a degree in 1950 and moved to New York to write.

A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, when Hansberry was twenty-nine, making her the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. Drawn from Langston Hughes's line about a dream deferred and from her own family's fight to live where it chose, the play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play that year and was translated into 35 languages within two years. She wrote the 1961 film version herself, starring Sidney Poitier. In May 1963 she joined James Baldwin and other Black artists at a tense meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy over civil rights enforcement, and her unfinished lecture To Be Young, Gifted and Black later gave Nina Simone the title of a 1969 song. Her second Broadway play closed the night she died.

Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, a white songwriter, in 1953 and separated from him within four years, though they never formally divorced and he kept producing her plays until her death. In private she was writing something the public record of her life did not catch up to for decades: two letters to the lesbian magazine The Ladder in 1957, signed only with initials, and near the end of her life a note to a friend declaring herself committed to, in her words, this homosexuality thing. None of it was public while she lived, in an era when the same country celebrating her as the voice of the Black American family had no room for the rest of her. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1963 at thirty-three, endured two failed surgeries, and died January 12, 1965, at thirty-four.

Nemiroff, as her executor, spent his life keeping her work in print and assembling her unfinished writing into the 1969 collage To Be Young, Gifted and Black, but he also sealed the letters that would have complicated the story he told, restricting her lesbian correspondence until his daughter released it to a scholar in 2013. The fuller record has since reshaped how the field reads her: the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame inducted her in 1999, the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2017, and a bronze statue went up at Chicago's Navy Pier in 2022. A Raisin in the Sun has never left Broadway for long, revived in 2004 and 2014, still taught alongside the woman who wrote it.

Lorraine Hansberry's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Hansberry v. Lee case
  Her father's Supreme Court challenge to a racially restrictive housing covenant 1940
• A Raisin in the Sun other
  First Broadway play written by a Black woman; won the NY Drama Critics' Circle Award 1959
• A Raisin in the Sun (film) film
  Screenplay by Hansberry, starring Sidney Poitier 1961
• The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window other
  Second Broadway play; closed the night she died 1964
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black other
  Posthumous stage collage of her writing, assembled by Robert Nemiroff 1969

• May 19, 1930 aged 0 Born on Chicago's South Side
• 1938 aged ~8 Family moves into a restricted block of Washington Park The move triggers the lawsuit that becomes Hansberry v. Lee.
• November 12, 1940 aged 10 U.S. Supreme Court decides Hansberry v. Lee in the family's favor
• 1946 aged ~16 Her father, Carl Hansberry, dies
• 1950 aged ~20 Leaves the University of Wisconsin and moves to New York
• June 20, 1953 aged 23 Marries Robert Nemiroff
• March 11, 1959 aged 28 A Raisin in the Sun opens on Broadway
• May 24, 1963 aged 33 Joins James Baldwin at a tense meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy
• January 12, 1965 aged 34 Dies of pancreatic cancer in New York

• James Baldwin 1924–1987
  Essayist and novelist whose searing explorations of race, sexuality, and identity remain profoundly relevant. joined at the Robert Kennedy meeting with
• Nina Simone 1933–2003
  Singer and pianist who joined classical training to jazz and civil rights protest songs. inspired a song title for
• Sidney Poitier 1927–2022
  First Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, breaking barriers in Hollywood. wrote the film role for
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. drew her title from
• W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963
  Sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist who was the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate. grew up in the circle of