Introduction


Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry’s most well-known play, A Raisin in the Sun, is based on her own experience as a young black woman living in a white neighborhood. It was not a pleasant time. In fact, Hansberry’s family was involved in a famous discrimination lawsuit, Hansberry v. Lee, in 1940. Her family fought against a covenant that tried to keep African-American families from buying houses. They won the lawsuit, but their time in the neighborhood, and Hansberry’s experiences at her predominantly white high school were, in her words, “hellishly hostile.” A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway. She was also the first African American and the youngest person to win the New York Drama Critics Award.

Essential Facts

  1. Hansberry died at the young age of 34 of pancreatic cancer. Her play The Sign in Sid Brustein’s Window closed its Broadway run the night she died.
  2. The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in San Francisco stages original African-American plays and revivals.
  3. The famous singer Nina Simone wrote a civil rights song called “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” based on Hansberry’s unfinished play of the same title.
  4. Hansberry was able to devote herself to writing full-time when her husband, Robert Nemiroff, wrote the hit song “Cindy, Oh Cindy.”
  5. Hansberry was commissioned in 1959 to write something for the National Broadcasting Company. She submitted her play The Drinking Gourd, but it was considered too controversial to be aired on television.