Lorraine Hansberry
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| Born: | May 19, 1930 Chicago, Illinois, USA |
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| Died: | January 12 1965 (aged 34) New York, New York, USA |
| Occupation(s): | playwright, author |
| Nationality: |  United States
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Lorraine Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965) was the first American playwright to create a realistic portrayal of African American urban family life. She ushered in a new era in theatre history by becoming the first African American writer and the youngest playwright to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for her play A Raisin in the Sun.
Biography
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Hansberry was the youngest child of real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry and Nannie Perry Hansberry. She grew up on the south side of Chicago in the Woodlawn neighborhood.
When she was eight, the family moved into an all white neighborhood, where they faced racial discrimination. Hansberry attended a predominantly white public school while her parents fought against segregation. Hansberry's father engaged in a legal battle against a racially Restrictive covenant that attempted to prohibit African-American families from buying homes in the area. The legal struggle over their move led to the landmark Supreme Court case of Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940). Though victors in the Supreme Court, Hansberry's family was subjected to what Hansberry would later describe as a "hellishily hostile white neighborhood." This experience later inspired her to write her most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun.
Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin and worked on the staff of Freedom magazine. It was at the time she wrote A Raisin in the Sun. The play was a huge success. It was the first play written by an African American woman and produced on Broadway. It also received the New York Drama Critics Award making Hansberry the youngest and first African American to receive the Award. She then moved to New york in 1950.
In year she married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish literature student and songwriter, in 1953. They separated in 1957 and divorced in 1964.
She died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965 at the age of 34.
A Raisin In The Sun
Lorraine's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun made her the first black woman to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle's Best Play award. The play has become a classic. In 2004, A Raisin in the Sun received a Broadway revival earning Tony Awards for Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald.
The Sign in Sydney Brustein's Window ran for 101 performances on Broadway and closed the night she died. Her ex-husband Nemiroff became the literary executor for several of her unfinished works. Notably, he adapted many of her writings into the play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was the longest-running Off-Broadway play of the 1968-1969 season. It appeared in book form the following year under the title, To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words.
She left behind an unfinished novel and three unfinished plays.
Legacy
After her success with A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry became an important forerunner of African American drama and literature. Many who followed felt a great debt to her vision. In San Francisco, The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, which specializes in original stagings and revivals of African-American theatre, is named in honor of Lorraine Hansberry. Singer and pianist Nina Simone, who was a close friend of Hansberry, used the title of her unfinished play to write a civil rights song; "to be young gifted and black" together with Weldon Irvine. The single reached the top 10 of the R&B charts. [1] A studio recording was released as a single and the first live recording on october 26, 1969 was captured on Black Gold (1970). [edit] Litigation The experiences in her play A Raisin in the Sun are also the subject of the lawsuit Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940), in which the Hansberry family fought to have their day in court because a previous action about racially motivated restrictive covenants (Burke v. Kleiman, 277 Ill. App. 519 (1934)) was similar to the case at hand. They won their right to be heard as a matter of Due Process of Law in relation to the Fourteenth Amendment because the first suit was not directed towards a class of defendants but only those defendants individually.
Interestingly, the plaintiff Burke, who had led the suit to enforce the racial restriction in 1934 actually sold his home to Carl Hansberry (Lorraine's Father) when he changed his mind about the validity of the covenant.
Lorraine reflects upon the litigation in her book To Be Young Gifted and Black:
25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nations ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy with disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America including being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German [L]uger [pistol], doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court."
Works
- (---) On Summer (Essay)
- (1959) A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
- (1960) The Drinking Gourd (1960)
- (1961) A Raisin in the Sun, screenplay (1961)
- (1964) The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964)
- (1965) The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1965)
- (1970) To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words(1970)
- (1994) Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays/by Lorraine Hansberry
Trivia
She is the first cousin of stage director and playwright Shaunielle Perry.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
James, Rosetta. Cliff Notes on Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Lincoln, Nebraska: Cliff Notes Inc, 1992 Lorraine Hansberry (1930 - 1965) ” http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/corhans.htm 2003
Notes
^ http://www.boscarol.com/nina/html/where/tobeyounggifted.html
External links
Biography PAL: Perspectives in American Literature Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color - Lorraine Hansberry Lorraine Hansberry's Gravesite Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Hansberry"
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