Black History Month-Lorraine Vivian Hansberry

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930 in Chicago and raised in a middle-class family. When she was 7 or 8 her family moved to a restricted white neighborhood which was against the law at that time. The Hansberrys had to go to court in order to remain in their home which was vandalized on several occasions. Lorraine Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin, studied at Roosevelt University, attended the New School for Social Research, and studied African Culture and History with W.E.B. DuBois at the Jefferson School for Social Sciences in New York. During that time she wrote for Paul Robeson's Freedom magazine and participated in liberal causes. In 1953 she married Robert Nemiroff, a white writer and activist; they were divorced in 1964.


The production of her play, A Raisin in the Sun catapulted Hansberry into the forefront of the theatre world. She was named most promising playwright of the season by Variety's poll of New York Drama Critics. Upon receiving that year's Drama Desk Award, Lorraine Hansberry became the youngest person and the first African-American to win that distinguished honor. In 1961 the film version of the play, starring Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Ruby Dee opened; Hansberry won a special award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Screen Writer's Guild Award for her screenplay. A second television adaptation of the play aired in 1989 starring Danny Glover, Esther Rolle, and Kim Yancey.

Hansberry's second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window was not as successful. The show ran for only 101 performances and closed on January 12, 1965, the very day that Lorraine Hansberry died at 34 of cancer, cutting short a glorious career and leaving behind several unfinished works such as Toussaint, an opera based on the life of the 18th C. Haitian leader. Robert Nemiroff, her ex-husband and the executor of her estate, published Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry in 1972, which contained The Drinking Gourd, Les Blancs, and What Use are Flowers.