Dec 10, 2018 · It is this unflinching posture that makes Lorraine and James Baldwin's famous 1963 meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy so fascinating. Of course she was an elegant and poised role ...
Dec 16, 2020 · In May 1963, in a Kennedy family living room on Central Park South, Lorraine Hansberry tried to defend civil rights activists’ safety. The Raisin in the Sun playwright had come along with actor Harry Belafonte, author James Baldwin, and other luminaries at the invitation of Robert F. Kennedy and Baldwin. She listened as activist Jerome Smith tried to impress upon …
In 1963, when Hansberry and Baldwin were invited to a meeting on race relations with then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Hansberry did not mince words; read about the tense meeting here. And read “Sweet Lorraine,” Baldwin’s moving posthumous tribute to his friend, here. Hansberry was an early member of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB).
Apr 22, 2020 · 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.”
According to historian Fanon Che Wilkins, "Hansberry believed that gaining civil rights in the United States and obtaining independence in colonial Africa were two sides of the same coin that presented similar challenges for Africans on both sides of the Atlantic." In response to the independence of Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah, Hansberry wrote: "The promise of the future of Ghana is that of all the colored peoples of the world; it is the promise of freedom."
Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, aged 34. James Baldwin believed "it is not at all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man."
Carl Hansberry was also a supporter of the Urban League and NAACP in Chicago. Both Hansberrys were active in the Chicago Republican Party. Carl died in 1946 when Lorraine was fifteen years old; "American racism helped kill him," she later said.
Hansberry's ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, became the executor for several unfinished manuscripts. He added minor changes to complete the play Les Blancs, which Julius Lester termed her best work, and he 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. It appeared in book form the following year under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. 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.
Written and completed in 1957 , A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, becoming the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The 29-year-old author became the youngest American playwright and only the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. She was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, among the four Tony Awards that the play was nominated for in 1960. Over the next two years, Raisin was translated into 35 languages and was being performed all over the world.
In 1973, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, entitled Raisin, opened on Broadway, with music by Judd Woldin, lyrics by Robert Brittan, and a book by Nemiroff and Charlotte Zaltzberg. The show ran for more than two years and won two Tony Awards, including Best Musical .
Around the same time, Hansberry began studying at the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Communist Party–affiliated center for adult education in Harlem, where she befriended one of its luminary instructors, W. E. B. Du Bois. The famed radical “recognized Lorraine’s gifts, and . . . she became his favorite student . . . gifted enough to teach others as well as study under his tutelage.”
Soon after moving, a ruling forced the Hansberrys out of their new house. Carl appealed to the Supreme Court, yielding a partial victory three years later. While the court upheld the restrictive covenant, it deemed the contracts poorly written; the Hansberrys could stay at 6140 South Rhodes Avenue. The court also opened up five hundred new properties to black residents.
Ten days after her keynote, on March 11, A Raisin in the Sun debuted at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. A few black audience members came the first night, the second night more, and by the third night, at least half of those watching were African American.
Lorraine Hansberry with her husband Robert Nemiroff at their home in Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Hansberry and Nemiroff met in 1952, on a picket line protesting the segregation of New York University basketball teams. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Nemiroff was completing a graduate degree in English at NYU.
In 1959 Lorraine Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. Soon after A Raisin in the Sun made history, the 28-year-old writer and activist talked to Studs Terkel about racial and gender inequity and the role of art in confronting difficult truths about our world. ———. To learn more about Lorraine Hansberry, watch ...
In 1969, Nina Simone, whose politics had been greatly affected by her friendship with Hansberry, recorded the song “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” in her memory. “Singing (Lorraine Hansberry),” ca. 1957-58.
In October of 1964, three months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened on Broadway. At the time, Hansberry was already famous for A Raisin in the Sun, but the intervening years had not been kind. Shingles racked her body, and she’d been diagnosed with cancer.
IBW21 (The Institute of the Black World 21st Century) is committed to building the capacity of Black communities in the U.S. to work for the social, political, economic and cultural upliftment, the development of the global Black community and an enhanced quality of life for all marginalized people.
Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart: The Life and Work of Playwright Lorraine Hansberry was supported by two grants from NEH, a development grant in 2008 and a production grant in 2014.
The text of this article is available for unedited republication, free of charge, using the following credit: “Originally published as “Consider Her a Witness” in the summer 2019 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.” Please notify us at [email protected] if you are republishing it or have any questions..
Lorraine Hansberry letter to The Ladder, 1, no. 8 (May 1957); Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry; To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, ed. by Robert Nemiroff; A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry with introduction by Robert Nemiroff.
It may seem odd to precede an article with a chronology, but it is odder still that to date no chronology has been published on Lorraine Hansberry. This failure in scholarship is symptomatic of the continuing critical and scholarly neglect of important black artists and especially of Hansberry.
At the time Lorraine Hansberry began creating her dramas, many writers pictured the modern world as overly complex, baffling, and overwhelming.
My colleagues and I were reduced to mirth and tears by that gentleman writing his review of [ A Raisin in the Sun] in a Connecticut paper who remarked of his pleasure at seeing how "our dusky brethren" could "come up with a song and hum their troubles away." It did not disturb the writer in the least that there is no such implication in the entire three acts.
See also, Steven R. Carter, "The John Brown Theatre: Lorraine Hansberry's Cultural Views and Dramatic Goals," Freedomways, Vol. 19, No. 4, 186-91.
During the late 1940s, Lorraine Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin and joined the Young Progressives of America (YPA) and the Labor Youth League (LYL). These organizations were committed to ending the Cold War, working for world peace and racial equality. Hansberry also developed an interest in African affairs.
Hansberry entered the literary and theater scene with pioneering achievements in the late 1950s. Her play “A Raisin in the Sun” took Broadway by storm in 1959, being the first production authored by an African-American woman. The play was later made into a film starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee.
Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1965) was an American playwright and author best known for A Raisin in the Sun, a 1959 play that was influenced by her background and upbringing in Chicago. The fascinating facts about Lorraine Hansberry that follow illustrate her development as a Black woman, activist, and writer. Though A Raisin in the Sun i s the crown ...
The Hansberry family had many friends and relatives that were involved in the arts. W.E.B. Du Bois, the Civil Rights activist, author, sociologist, and historian, and Paul Robeson, the musician and actor, were friends of the Hansberry family. Hansberry’s uncle, William Leo Hansberry, founded the Howard University African Civilization section ...
When she was only 29 years old, Hansberry became the youngest American and the first African-American playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play. “It is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes [in the parlance of the time], and life.
Written and completed in 1957, A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, becoming the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The 29-year-old author became the youngest American playwright and only the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. She was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, among the four Tony Awardsthat the play was nominated for in …
Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate broker and Nannie Louise (born Perry), a driving school teacher and ward committeewoman.
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 latter's legal efforts to force the Hans…
Hansberry graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary in 1944 and from Englewood High School in 1948. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she immediately became politically active with the Communist Party USA and integrated a dormitory. 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".
In 1950, Hansberry decided to leave Madison and pursue her career as a writer in New York City, where she attended The New School. She moved to Harlem in 1951 and became involved in activist struggles such as the fight against evictions.
In 1951, Hansberry joined the staff of the black newspaper Freedom, edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. Du Bois, whose office wa…
According to historian Fanon Che Wilkins, "Hansberry believed that gaining civil rights in the United States and obtaining independence in colonial Africa were two sides of the same coin that presented similar challenges for Africans on both sides of the Atlantic." In response to the independence of Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah, Hansberry wrote: "The promise of the future of Ghana is that of all the colored peoples of the world; it is the promise of freedom."
Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, aged 34. James Baldwin believed "it is not at all farfetched to suspect that what she saw contributed to the strain which killed her, for the effort to which Lorraine was dedicated is more than enough to kill a man."
Hansberry's funeral was held in Harlem on January 15, 1965. Paul Robeson and SNCC organizer James Forman gave eulogies. The presiding minister, Eugene Callender, recited messages from …
Hansberry's ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, became the executor for several unfinished manuscripts. He added minor changes to complete the play Les Blancs, which Julius Lester termed her best work, and he adapted many of her writings into the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was the longest-running Off Broadwayplay of the 1968–69 season. It appeared in book form the following year under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own …