Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) was a playwright and activist, whose stories centered African-American, working class families. Despite a tragically short career, she became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway.
Every weekday, listeners explore the trials, tragedies, and triumphs of groundbreaking women throughout history who have dramatically shaped the world around us. In each 5 minute episode, we’ll dive into the story behind one woman listeners may or may not know -- but definitely should. These diverse women from across space and time are grouped into easily accessible and engaging monthly themes like Leading Ladies, Activists, STEMinists, Local Legends, and many more. Encyclopedia Womannica is hosted by WMN co-founder and award-winning journalist Jenny Kaplan. The bite-sized episodes pack painstakingly researched content into fun, entertaining, and addictive daily adventures.
Encyclopedia Womannica was created by Liz Kaplan and Jenny Kaplan, executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, and produced by Liz Smith, Cinthia Pimentel, Grace Lynch, and Maddy Foley. Special thanks to Shira Atkins, Edie Allard, and Carmen Borca-Carrillo.
We are offering free ad space on Wonder Media Network shows to organizations working towards social justice. For more information, please email Jenny at jenny@wondermedianetwork.com.
Follow Wonder Media Network:
Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today’s storyteller was a playwright and activist, whose stories centered African-American, working class families. Despite a tragically short career, she became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. Half a century later, her work remains one of the most celebrated snapshots of Black struggles and Black joy.
Here’s the story of Lorraine Hansberry.
Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19th, 1930, on the South Side of Chicago. Her father, Carl Augustus, was a prominent figure within the city’s Black community, having founded one of the first African-American banks.
Growing up, Lorraine and her three older siblings played host to a number of famous people, including Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois, Duke Ellington, and Olympic Gold medalist Jesse Owens.
Despite their middle-class status and cultural connections, the Hansberry’s were still subject to Chicago’s deeply ingrained housing segregation.
Agreements known as restrictive covenants were widespread throughout the city. White property owners could collectively agree not to sell to African-Americans. This practice created a ghetto known as the Black Belt, which ran through the South Side.
When Lorraine was eight years old, her father secretly bought a home in one of the so-called restricted neighborhoods. In 1937, when the family moved in, a white mob attacked. A brick was thrown through the window, narrowly missing Lorraine. The local homeowner’s association filed an injunction for the Hansberry’s to vacate. Lorraine and her siblings were chased, spat at, and beaten during their walks to and from school.
The Supreme Court of Illinois doubled down on the legality of the restrictive covenant, and the Hansberry’s were forced out of their home. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned this ruling on a technicality. Thirty blocks subsequently opened up to Black families across the South Side. While this ruling, and the Hansberry’s fight, did not outlaw restrictive covenants, it did signal the beginning of the end for the practice.
Lorraine attended Chicago’s Englewood High School, where she became interested in theater. She initially attended the University of Wisconsin, where she cut her teeth with the Communist Party USA, but left after two years.
In 1950, Lorraine moved to New York to be a writer.
By 1951, Lorraine had found a home in Harlem, and began socializing with many of the great thinkers who had once visited her family back in Chicago. She started writing for Paul Robeson’s Freedom, a progressive newspaper.
At a protest against racial discrimination at New York University, Lorraine met Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer. They married at her family home in Chicago in 1953.
In 1956, Robert co-wrote the hit song, “Cindy, Oh Cindy.” Its profits allowed Lorraine to stop working to focus on writing. She began developing a play that she initially called The Crystal Stair, from the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son.” She would later change the name to “A Raisin in the Sun.” This, too, was from a Langston Hughes poem: Harlem.
“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up, like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore -- and then run?”
“A Raisin in the Sun” centers on a Black, working class family on Chicago’s South Side as they try to improve their financial situation. The patriarch of the family has died, and a $10,000 insurance payout is imminent. Do they use the money to buy a house, in the cheaper, all-white neighborhood nearby? Do they use it to invest in a liquor store? In education?
Lorraine based many of the characters on the families who’d rented from her father, and with whom she’d attended high school.
The cast, save for one character, was entirely Black. Lorraine was in her 20s. And the play itself dealt with racism, life in Chicago’s Black Belt, and the pain of assimilation into white culture -- topics that were considered risky for the predominantly white theatergoing crowd. It took over a year to raise enough money to put the play up.
When it debuted in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, and the first to be led by an African-American director. Lorraine was 29 years old.
The play was an almost instant hit. The New York Drama Critics Circle named it the best play of the year. Just five months after its Broadway debut, A Raisin in the Sun opened in London’s West End. In 1961, a film starring much of the original cast was released, and several of the actors received Golden Globe nominations.
But perhaps the most important element of the play’s success was that, in telling Black stories, Lorraine also made theater accessible in previously unimaginable ways.
As the writer James Baldwin noted, "I had never in my life seen so many Black people in the theater. And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage. Black people had ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them."
Lorraine would go on to finish and stage just one other play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, about a Jewish intellectual. The play, which explored themes of homosexuality and the bohemian lifestyle, debuted to mixed reviews in 1964.
It ran for just over 100 performances, closing on January 12, 1965. That same day, Lorraine Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer. She was 34 years old.
After Lorraine’s death, her ex-husband, Robert, had several of her plays produced posthumously. To Be Young, Gifted and Black became an autobiographical work, drawing on Lorraine’s letters, interviews and journal entries. The title came from a 1964 speech of Lorraine’s, when she spoke to the winners of a United Negro Fund writing competition.
“Though it be a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times,” she said, “It is doubly so, doubly dynamic, to be young, gifted and Black.”
All month, we’re talking about storytellers.
For more on why we’re doing what we’re doing, check out our newsletter Womannica Weekly.
Follow us on facebook and instagram @encyclopediawomannica.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!