Lorraine Hansberry
1 book analyzed
Biography
Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965) was born in Chicago to a middle-class Black family who had fought their way into a white neighborhood. In 1937, her father Carl Hansberry purchased a house in a white South Side neighborhood. A white homeowners' association obtained a court order to evict them under Illinois's racially restrictive covenant laws. The family refused to leave. Carl Hansberry took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court; Hansberry v. Lee (1940) was decided in the family's favor on procedural grounds — it did not overturn restrictive covenants, but it was a significant civil rights victory. Lorraine was seven years old. The family received death threats and had a concrete block thrown through their window. She grew up understanding that a home was a political act. At twenty-eight, Hansberry became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, which A Raisin in the Sun won in 1959 over Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. She was twenty-nine. She died of pancreatic cancer at thirty-four, in 1965, the year before Black Power movements transformed the conversation her play had begun.