Lorraine Hansberry About the Author of A Raisin in the Sun

Lorraine Hansberry ( )  Was the youngest of four children  Lived in South Side Chicago  Had prominent intellectual parents –Father was involved in banking and real estate. He also ran for Congress at one point. –Mother was a former schoolteacher. Both parents were very involved in politics and civil rights.  Met some of the greatest African Americans of her generation including Langston Hughes (poet), Duke Ellington (musician), Joe Louis and Jesse Owens (athletes) and W.E.B. DuBois (writer/civil rights leader)

Movin’ On Up?  Hansberry’s parents had experience in politics and activism. In 1938 (when Lorraine was 8), Carl Hansberry challenged the segregated housing pattern in Chicago when he purchased a house in an all-white neighborhood.  Even though there were “restrictive covenants” (see next slide) in place, the family moved in and faced numerous attacks from angry white mobs.

Restrictive Covenant  A restrictive covenant is a legal obligation imposed in a deed by the seller upon the buyer of real estate to do or not to do something.  Example: –November 1927 (Capitol Hill) – The parties… agree with the others that no part of the lands owned by them shall ever be used or occupied by or sold, conveyed, leased, rented or given to Negroes or any person of Negro blood.

The Hansberrys Go To Court  The Hansberrys were forced to leave by court order, but Carl Hansberry was not to be deterred. He took his case to the Supreme Court, and in 1940, the Court ruled restrictive covenants unconstitutional in a case that became known as Hansberry v. Lee.  Unfortunately, the court ruling did little to change segregated housing in Chicago and Carl remained very disillusioned and bitter about his experience. These feelings show through in Raisin.  In 1946, Carl died suddenly in Mexico while making plans to move his family to Mexico City to escape the racism of the U.S.

Early Adulthood  Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin but left after 2 years because she found college to be uninspiring.  In 1950, when she was 20 years old, she moved to New York City to become a writer. She became pretty successful as a newspaper writer and editor of Paul Robeson’s progressive magazine, Freedom.

 In 1953, she met her future husband, Robert Nemiroff, on a picket line (protesting the exclusion of blacks from NYU basketball team), and they spent the night before their wedding protesting the execution of the Rosenbergs (read about the Rosenbergs here:  Nemiroff was wealthy, white, and Jewish.  Hansberry completed her first play, A Raisin in the Sun in 1957(when she was 27 years old). By 1959, it became the first play written by an African-American woman to ever be performed on Broadway.

 The play’s premiere in 1959 was a cultural event, giving voice to a generation ready to be heard. Hansberry dramatized the dreams and disappointments of African Americans in general, but she also depicted an ordinary family whose struggles, conflicts, and triumphs all people could recognize.

What made this play so special?  A Raisin in the Sun was a revolutionary work for its time. Hansberry creates in the Younger family one of the first honest depictions of a black family on an American stage, in an age when predominantly black audiences simply did not exist. Before this play, African-American roles, usually small and comedic, largely employed ethnic stereotypes. Hansberry, however, shows an entire black family in a realistic light, one that is unflattering and far from comedic. She uses black vernacular throughout the play and broaches important issues and conflicts, such as poverty, discrimination, and the construction of African-American racial identity.

What made this play so special?  A Raisin in the Sun explores not only the tension between white and black society but also the strain within the black community over how to react to an oppressive white community. Hansberry’s drama asks difficult questions about assimilation and identity.  Hansberry also addressed feminist questions ahead of their time in A Raisin in the Sun. Through the character of Beneatha, Hansberry proposes that marriage is not necessary for women and that women can and should have ambitious career goals.

Awards  A Raisin in the Sun won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in In addition to being the youngest ever recipient of the award, she was also the first African-American and only the fifth woman to receive the award.  She continued writing many other plays, essays, and articles after Raisin’s success.  She divorced her husband in March 1965.

A Legacy  Unfortunately, Hansberry’s life and career were cut short by an early death. In January 1965, at the age of 34, she died of pancreatic cancer.