She’s best known for being the playwright behind the award-winning, classic play “A Raisin in the Sun.” But that’s not all there is to Lorraine Hansberry.
She was thrust into activism as a child, as her family attempted to integrate a segregated Chicago neighborhood. Their case even went to the Supreme Court!
When they won, unhappy white racist mobs continued harassing them, and once, Hansberry narrowly dodged a brick thrown through the family’s window.
An activist in college, she eventually decided to drop out and move to Harlem.
It was there she began writing for Freedom, a Black radical newspaper, with W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. She also secretly wrote for a lesbian magazine called The Ladder, though because homosexuality was still illegal at the time, she was not publicly “out.”
She was quite outspoken, however, about her politics - her activism animated the Civil Rights Movement as much as her plays.
According to Hansberry, Black people “must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent.” Tired of ineffective appeals for equality - like her parents’ court case - she wanted radical action.
Unfortunately for the world, Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at only 34 years old. We can always remember her, however, through the song “Young, Gifted, and Black,” which Nina Simone wrote about her.