african american woman

Lorraine Hansberry

How much do you know about Lorraine Hansberry?

Lorraine Hansberry

As a theatre artist, I’ve always known that she was the author of A Raisin in the Sun, of course, and of the film version of the play, as well as a couple of other rarely produced plays.  I knew that this made her the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway.  I knew that the play was slightly autobiographical – although Hansberry’s family was fairly well off, her family moved into a white neighborhood in Chicago in the 1950′s, and faced the kind of violence and racism that the Younger family in A Raisin in the Sun are afraid of.  And I knew that she died very young, losing a battle to cancer at the age of 34.

But I didn’t know much about her life beyond those few tidbits.

Her own words, at a 1959 conference called “The Negro Writer and His Roots,” speak to her history far more compellingly than anything I might hope to compile:

“I was born on the Southside of Chicago.  I was born black and a female.  I was born in a depression after one world war, and came into adolescence during another. While I was still in my teens the first atom bombs were dropped on human beings at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and by the time I was twenty-three years old my government and that of the Soviet Union had entered actively into the worst conflict of nerves in human history – the Cold War.

I have lost friends and relatives through cancer, lynching and war. I have been personally the victim of physical attack which was the offspring of racial and political hysteria. I have worked with the handicapped and seen the ravages of congenital diseases that we have not yet conquered because we spend our time and ingenuity in far less purposeful wars. I see daily on the streets of New York, street gangs and prostitutes and beggars; I have, like all of you, on a thousand occasions seen indescribable displays of man’s very real inhumanity to man; and I have come to maturity, as we all must, knowing that greed and malice, indifference to human misery and perhaps, above all else, ignorance – the prime ancient and persistent enemy of man – abound in this world.

I say all of this to say that one cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and react to the miseries which afflict this world.

I have given you this account so that you know that what I write is not based on the assumption of idyllic possibilities or innocent assessments of the true nature of life – but, rather, my own personal view that, posing one against the other, I think that the human race does command its own destiny, and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars…”

From To be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (adapted by Robert Nemiroff)..