This is her earliest remaining theatrical work. 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. To celebrate the newspaper's first birthday, Hansberry wrote the script for a rally at Rockland Palace, a then-famous Harlem hall, 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." Performers in this pageant included Paul Robeson, his longtime accompanist Lawrence Brown, the multi-discipline artist Asadata Dafora, and numerous others. Īdditionally, she wrote scripts at Freedom. At the newspaper, she worked as "subscription clerk, receptionist, typist, and editorial assistant" besides writing news articles and editorials.
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Du Bois, whose office was in the same building, and other Black Pan-Africanists. In 1951, Hansberry joined the staff of the black newspaper Freedom, edited by Louis E. She moved to Harlem in 1951 and became involved in activist struggles such as the fight against evictions. 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 spent the summer of 1949 in Mexico, studying painting at the University of Guadalajara. Wallace's Progressive Party presidential campaign in 1948, despite her mother's disapproval. 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". She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she immediately became politically active with the Communist Party USA and integrated a dormitory. Hansberry graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary in 1944 and from Englewood High School in 1948. Hansberry was the godmother to Nina Simone's daughter Lisa. Her cousin is the flutist, percussionist, and composer Aldridge Hansberry.
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Her grandniece is the actress Taye Hansberry. Lorraine Hansberry has many notable relatives including director and playwright Shauneille Perry, whose eldest child is named after her. Lorraine was taught: "Above all, there were two things which were never to be betrayed: the family and the race." DuBois, poet Langston Hughes, singer, actor, and political activist Paul Robeson, musician Duke Ellington, and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens.Ĭarl Hansberry's brother, William Leo Hansberry, founded the African Civilization section of the History Department at Howard University. The Hansberrys were routinely visited by prominent black people, including sociology professor W. Carl died in 1946 when Lorraine was fifteen years old "American racism helped kill him," she later said. Both Hansberrys were active in the Chicago Republican Party. 1 (1948).Ĭarl Hansberry was also a supporter of the Urban League and NAACP in Chicago. The restrictive covenant was ruled contestable, though not inherently invalid these covenants were eventually ruled unconstitutional in Shelley v. The latter's legal efforts to force the Hansberry family out culminated in the U.S. 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.
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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. Hansberry inspired the Nina Simone song, " To Be Young, Gifted and Black", whose title-line came from Hansberry's autobiographical play. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. Hansberry's writings also discussed her lesbianism and the oppression of homosexuality. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Lee.Īfter 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. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 US Supreme Court case Hansberry v. The title of the play was taken from the poem " Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award - making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer.