“I was born black and female,” Lorraine Hansberry said. These twin identities would dominate her life and her work. Rejecting the limits placed on her race and her gender, she employed her writing and her life as a social activist to expand the meaning of what it meant to be a black woman.
Her first play, A Raisin In the Sun, is based on her childhood experiences of desegregating a white neighborhood. It won the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award as Best Play of the Year. She was the youngest American, the fifth woman and the first African American to win the award.
Hansberry was born in 1930, the youngest of four children of Carl and Nannie Hansberry, a respected and successful black family in Chicago, Illinois. Both parents were activists challenging discriminating Jim Crow Laws. Because of their stature in the black community such important leaders as Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Langston Hughes frequented the Hansberry home as Lorraine was growing up.
In New York, she met famous Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who would heavily influence her future works. She took several classes, including one taught by W.E.B. DuBois, and began writing for Paul Robeson at the progressive Freedom newspaper. Joining the Freedom staff gave Hansberry the opportunity to write some of her first essays on the state of Black America.
While A Raisin in the Sun saw continued success, Hansberry continued writing other works, including a photo documentary on behalf of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), entitled The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality.
Hansberry used the success of A Raisin In the Sun as a platform to speak out for the American Civil Rights Movement and for the African struggle to free itself from white rule. She helped raise money, gave impassioned speeches and took part in panels and interviews to further these causes.
Diagnosed with cancer, Hansberry health quickly began to deteriorate. She was hospitalized and stricken to a wheelchair for the last days of her life. Hansberry died on January 12, 1965 at the young age of 34.
Hansberry’s former husband organized and compiled some of her unpublished literature. To Be Young, Gifted, and Black was produced in 1969 and published as a book in 1970. The play Les Blancs, French for The Whites, was also performed in 1970.