Groundbreaking playwright, essayist and advocate for change, Lorraine Hansberry authored A Raisin in the Sun, becoming the first Black woman to have a Broadway show produced, the first Black playwright and youngest American to receive the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play (1959), and the first Black American to win the Drama Desk Award. To Hansberry, the play expresses an America where “we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks people who are the very essence of human dignity.” As Hansberry reminded Studs Terkel, “in order to create the universal, you must pay attention to the specific.” And, Hansberry said: “the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women;” those who are “twice oppressed” may become “twice militant.” Both reminders resonate in revivals through Hansberry’s particularities of Chicago racism, Black women’s lives, and universal dignity, commitments equally manifest in her civil rights efforts.
Born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Hansberry was shaped by her family and the Black intellectual world, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. Working on the staff of Paul Robeson’s Freedom Magazine, writing to the Ladder and for the Village Voice, Hansberry’s voice was cut short by pancreatic cancer at 34. In her unfinished play Les Blancs, produced recently in 2015, colonialism and the Middle Passage represent Hansberry’s vision informed by art, the world, and her scholar uncle, Leo Hansberry.
At her funeral, Martin Luther King Jr. observed: “Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.” Inspiring artists and citizens, Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black” echoes Hansberry’s 1964 words to Readers Digest/ United Negro College Fund creative writing awardees: “though it be a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic – to be young, gifted and Black.”
Photo by Gin Briggs, courtesy of the Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff Trust and Joi Gresham, LHLT.org
