Lorraine's uncle, William Leo Hansberry, taught African history at Howard University. Her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a successful real estate entrepreneur involved with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Urban League. At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Clybourne Park is a "spin-off" of Lorraine Hansberry's famous 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, meaning that it centers around some of the play's peripheral events and characters.Specifically, the main characters of A Raisin in the Sun the Younger familywill eventually move into the house in which Clybourne Park is set. According to Kevin J. Mumford, however, beyond reading homophile magazines and corresponding with their creators, "no evidence has surfaced" to support claims that Hansberry was directly involved in the movement for gay and lesbian civil equality. Who are young, gifted and black . Hansberry's most famous work, "A Raisin In The Sun" remains one of the best known plays ever written by a Black female playwright. Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote A Raisin in the Sun using inspiration from her years growing up in the segregated South Side of Chicago. This made her the first Chicago native to be honored along the North Halsted corridor. The show ran for more than two years and won two Tony Awards, including Best Musical. For some facts about W.E.B Du Bois CLICK HERE, Theatrical release poster for the 1961 film. Hansberry was interested in writing from an early age and while in high school was drawn especially to the theatre. The FBI began surveillance of Hansberry when she prepared to go to the Montevideo peace conference. Now More Than Ever, Nine Radical and Radiant Facts You Should Know About Lorraine Hansberry, When Colin Kaepernick Took the Risk to Take a Knee, Coming Home to the Motherland and Coming Out: A Cup Of Water Under My Bed Gets Translated to Spanish, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, Ring In the Zinntennial! Follow her on Twitter at@emilykpowers. Hansberrys work as a writer and activist was groundbreaking in its exploration of the experiences of African American women. In 1969, four years after Lorraine Hansberrys death, Nina Simone wrote a song titled Young, Gifted, and Black after being inspired by a talk that Hansberry delivered to college students. The single reached the top 10 of the R&B charts. She was the daughter of a real estate entrepreneur, Carl Hansberry, and schoolteacher, Nannie Hansberry, as well as the niece of Pan-Africanist scholar and college professor Leo Hansberry. Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930 at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago. Celebrating 100 Years of Howard Zinn, Our Supremely Regressive Court of the Unsettled States: A Resisters Reading List, Free eBook Downloads of Resources for the Movement to End Gun Violence, Observation Post: Individual Liberty vs. Public SafetyOur Distorted Thinking About Gun Control, Black Women Physicians Stories Have Gone Untold for Far Too Long, Sister Rosetta Tharpes Ancestral Rocking and Rolling Aint Through Just Yet, The Rebellious Mrs. Rosa Parks Youll Meet in Peacocks Documentary, Beacon Behind the Books: Meet Matt Davis, Chief Financial Officer, with Clifford Manko. Image by Eden, Janine and Jim from Wikimedia. James Baldwin wrote the introduction to Hansberrys biography, Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life. Lorraine Hansberry Elementary School was located in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. She was brought up alongside three siblings. However, Karl Linder is the only character to appear in both . Tags: american birth day 19 birth month may birth year 1930 death day 12 death month january death year 1965 playwright. Lorraine Hansberry was an African-American playwright, writer and activist who lived from 1930 to 1965. Patricia and Fredrick McKissack wrote a children's biography of Hansberry, Young, Black, and Determined, in 1998. Perry explains that though the term radical has negative associations, for Lorraine, American radicalism was both a passion and a commitment. Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry - Mollie Godfrey 2021-01-15 We would like, said Lorraine, from you, a moral commitment. He did not turn from her as he had turned away from Jerome. Hansberrys work broke barriers and paved the way for more diverse voices to be heard on the Broadway stage. She was born to Carl Augustus Hansberry and Nonnie Louise. 1. She was 34 years old when she died after a two-year fight with pancreatic cancer. It went on to inspire generations of playwrights and performers. . B. Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) was a playwright, writer, and activist. Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. Princeton Professor Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine, wrote that she was a feminist before the feminist movement. When she was young, her family famously fought against racial segregation, attempting to buy a home that was covered by a racially restrictive covenantultimately leading to the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965) was an African-American playwright and writer. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Hansberry in the biographical dictionary 100 Greatest African Americans. Born in 1930, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was the youngest of Carl and Nannie Hansberry's four children. Hansberry was born May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of four children. Lorraine used the theater to share her views. She admonished the Kennedy administration to be more active in addressing the problem of segregation in the community. For local insights and insiders travel tips that you wont find anywhere else, search any keywords in the top right-hand toolbar on this page. The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. Biography. Her cousin is the flutist, percussionist, and composer Aldridge Hansberry. I found myself wishing I could have been Lorraines friend, or at the very least, a fly on the wall during some of her passionate discussions about politics, race, literature and art with friends and colleagues. 519 (1934), had been similar to his situation. Louis Sachar Facts 8: Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Lorraine Hansberry was the niece of Leo Hansberry, who was a Pan-Africanist scholar and college professor. In the same year, Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which took her life at a mere age of 34. Lorraine Hansberry (1930 - 1965) was an American playwright and author best known for A Raisin in the Sun, a 1959 play influenced by her background and upbringing in Chicago. The granddaughter of a freed slave, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, to a successful real estate broker and a school teacher who resided in Chicago, Illinois. Feminism & Gender Perry truly brings Lorraine to life in this intimate book. Hansberry's. Lorraines extraordinary life has often been reduced to this one fact in classroomsif she is taught at all. She was the youngest of Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry's four children. Lorraine identified as an American radical and believed that extreme change was necessary to fight against racism and injustice internationally. Lorraine's father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a real-estate speculator and a proud race man. :). Lorraine Hansberry became involved in the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 and joined people like Lena Horne and James Baldwin to test Robert Kennedys position on civil rights. Also in 1963, Hansberry was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. As well as being a political activists, Lorraine Hansberry was also a brilliant writer. April 14, 2021. In fact, she was an active participant in the civil rights movement and used her talents as a writer and playwright to shed light on issues of race, gender and class in America. An alarm sounds, and a woman wakes. . A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. She reached out to the world through her plays. We get rid of all the little bombsand the big bombs," though she also believed in the right of people to defend themselves with force against their oppressors. The title of Hansberrys now-iconic play A Raisin In the Sun was inspired by Hughes poem Harlem. One could argue that the play illustrated the poems sentiment: Quotes from A Raisin in the Sun Du Bois, the Civil Rights activist, author, sociologist, and historian, and Paul Robeson, the musician and actor, were friends of the Hansberry family. Picture Information. A Raisin in the Sun - Mass Market Paperback By Lorraine Hansberry - VERY GOOD. Corrections? Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930 at the beginning of the Great Depression. She was also the youngest playwright and the first Black winner of the prestigious Drama Critic's Circle Award for Best Play. She also had several close relationships with women throughout her life, including a long-term relationship with a woman named Una Mulzac. Full title A Raisin in the Sun. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun exploded onto American theater scene on March 11, 1959, with such force that it garnered for the then-unknown black female playwright the Drama Circle Critics Award for 1958-59 in spite of such luminous competition as Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth . She identified as a lesbian and thought about LGBT organizing before there was a gay rights movement. This article is about the top 10 interesting facts about Lorraine Hansberry. As the first-ever black woman to author a play performed on. . Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) was born on this day, May 19. Fact 3: Lorraine was a talented visual artist. The thing I tried to show was the many gradations in even one Negro family, the clash of the old and the new, but most of all the unbelievable courage of the Negro people.. Lorraine Hansberry was a history-making playwright and author who became the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. Lorraine Hansberry was born at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago on May 19, 1930. There is a school in the Bronx called Lorraine Hansberry Academy, and an elementary school in St. Albans, Queens, New York, named after Hansberry as well. Carl Hansberry was also a supporter of the Urban League and NAACP in Chicago. She used her writing to redefine difference. Mumford stated that Hansberry's lesbianism caused her to feel isolated while A Raisin in the Sun catapulted her to fame; still, while "her impulse to cover evidence of her lesbian desires sprang from other anxieties of respectability and conventions of marriage, Hansberry was well on her way to coming out." Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940), to which the playwright Lorraine Hansberry's father was a party, when he fought to have his day in court despite the fact that a previous class action about racially motivated restrictive covenants, Burke v. Kleiman, 277 Ill. App. Lorraine was inspired by her father and the play that she wrote may have been a little ahead of its time, but it won top prize from the prestigious New York Drama Critics Circle, which was no small feat. The Hansberry family had many friends and relatives that were involved in the arts. . ", In a Town Hall debate on June 15, 1964, Hansberry criticized white liberals who could not accept civil disobedience, expressing a need to "encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical." He was known as a race man who sought to make the world a better place for African Americans. Posthumously, "A Raisin . . She was a member of the National Organization for Women and wrote about womens issues in her personal journals and in her writing. Born on the 19 th of May in 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, Lorraine Hansberry was a bright daughter of Carl Augustus Hansberry, a political activist, while her mother, Nannie Louise, was a schoolteacher. She was also a lesbian who kept her sexual preference as classified information, not able to come out during the tumultuous era in which basic human rights were denied on a regular basis, for certain groups of people in society. Due to racial differences, Lorraine and her family faced racism when she was just eight. Check another American writer in Lorraine Hansberry facts. This gave her a platform for sharing her views. Lorraine surrounded herself with many people who were important to the civil rights movement, as well as people who held a measure of influence and celebrity status in the world. . It seems, in fact, that, as with her dear friend the author James Baldwin, Hansberry is having a curiously vibrant renaissance some 54 years after her death, at the age of thirty-four from pancreatic cancer, on January 12, 1965. As a playwright. This week, Basic Black discusses legendary playwright Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Panelists: Lisa Simmons, director of the Roxbury I. AboutPressCopyrightContact. This is her earliest remaining theatrical work. She underwent two operations, on June 24 and August 2. View more property details, sales history and Zestimate data on Zillow. Language English. The song has also famously been recorded by artists including Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway. ", James Baldwin described Hansberry's 1963 meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, in which Hansberry asked for a "moral commitment" on civil rights from Kennedy. Fact 5: Indeed, Lorraine was an outspoken political activist from a young age. A Reader's Guide to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun - Pamela Loos 2008-01-01 Presents a critique and analysis of "A Raisin in the Sun," discussing the plot, themes, dramatic devices, and major characters in the play, and includes a brief overview of Hansberry's other works. Not only did she have a play, but her drama, A. She continued to write plays, short stories, and articles in addition to delivering speeches regarding race relations in the United States. Breaking her familys tradition of enrolling in Southern Black colleges, Hansberry took admission in the University of Wisconsin in Madison, changing her major from painting to writing. Date of first publication 1959. . There's something of an inside joke tucked into Lorraine Hansberry's rarely-produced second Broadway play, which director Anne Kauffman has brought to life in a starry revival at BAM. In her early twenties, having just arrived in New York from the Midwest, she published poems in radical journals; worked as a journalist for Freedom, a black leftist newspaper published by the. In 2013, Hansberry was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama, in recognition of her contributions to American culture and civil rights activism. Hansberry wrote two screenplays of Raisin, both of which were rejected as controversial by Columbia Pictures. The granddaughter of a freed slave, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, to a successful real estate broker and a school teacher who resided in Chicago, Illinois. She was also a civil rights activist and a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Hansberry and Nemiroff moved to Greenwich Village, the setting of her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. The African-American historian and scholar who is best known for his research on African history and culture. Her father, Carl Hansberry, was a successful real estate broker and a prominent figure in the African American community, who fought against racial segregation and discrimination. Lorraine Hansberry The Member of the Wedding The Metamorphosis The Natural The Plague The Plot Against America The Portrait of a Lady The Power of Sympathy The Red Badge of Courage The Road The Road from Coorain The Sound and the Fury The Stone Angel The Stranger The Sun Also Rises The Temple of My Familiar The Three Musketeers She used her writing to redefine difference. Then, she smiled. . Simone wrote the song with the poet Weldon Irvine and told him that she wanted lyrics that would "make black children all over the world feel good about themselves forever." In April 1959, as a sign of her sudden fame just one month after A Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway, photographer David Attie did an extensive photo-shoot of Hansberry for Vogue magazine, in the apartment at 337 Bleecker Street where she had written Raisin, which produced many of the best-known images of her today.