lorraine hansberry facts

A Raisin in the Sun Study Guide | Literature Guide | LitCharts . Lorraine Hansberry was the niece of Leo Hansberry, who was a Pan-Africanist scholar and college professor. . She is best known for writing "A Raisin in the Sun," the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway. Free shipping. Holiday House, 1998. In 1969, Nina Simone first released a song about Hansberry called "To Be Young, Gifted and Black." Not only did Hansberry address social and racial issues in her novels and plays, but she also wrote articles true to her voice and beliefs for a progressive Black journal, James Baldwin was her close friend and confidant. . In 1999 Hansberry was posthumously inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. The Quiet Lesbian Biography of Lorraine Hansberry - Autostraddle Lorraine Hansberry Biography - eNotes.com She came from a well-established family where both her parents had successful careers.. In 1963, Hansberry participated in a meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, set up by James Baldwin. The sq. Fact 6: In 1963, she met with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in New York City days after the protests and unrest in Birmingham Alabama (along with her close friend James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Clarence Jones and Jerome Smith, among others). Her father founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for blacks in Chicago, and ran a successful real estate business. Hansberry resided in a third-floor apartment in this building from 1953 to 1960, the period in which she created her . Fact 7: Nina Simones song To Be Young, Gifted and Black was written in memory of her close friend Lorraine. Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. She held out some hope for male allies of women, writing in an unpublished essay: "If by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved.". She spent the summer of 1949 in Mexico, studying painting at the University of Guadalajara. Queer Perspectives Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, into a middle-class family on the south side of Chicago, Illinois. 'A Raisin in the Sun' Reveals Playwright Lorraine Hansberry's Black The Double Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Out Magazine, September 1999) It was previously ruled that African Americans were not allowed to purchase property in the Washington Park subdivision in Chicago, Illinois. Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart - PBS 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. Author, Activist, Artist: 10 Things I Learned Watching 'Lorraine The single reached the top 10 of the R&B charts. It ran for 101 performances on Broadway and closed the night she died. Although the couple separated in 1957 and divorced in 1962, their professional relationship lasted until Hansberry's death. In 1961, Hansberry was set to replace Vinnette Carroll as the director of the musical Kicks and Co, after its try-out at Chicago's McCormick Place. . 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. Hansberrys father died in 1946 when she was only fifteen years old. Lorraine Hansberry is often viewed as a visionary because of her ability to predict many of the relevant issues to the African-American community today. 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. After Simone died on. Lorraines goal was to change society for the better. Race & Ethnicity in America Fact 8: Though she married a man, Lorraine identified as a lesbian. Beacon Press. What are five facts about Lorraine Hansberry and her career and adult 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. The production won Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Play for Rashad and Best Featured Actress in a Play for McDonald, and received a nomination for Best Revival of a Play. Legendary Playwright Lorraine Hansberry - YouTube Her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry was Leos brother. How would you rate this article? 10 Interesting Louis Sachar Facts | My Interesting Facts She is a tremendously important historical figure and through the documentary, Strain and her crew are making the public aware of just who Lorraine Hansberry was, what she stood for, and why her radical work is so important to the world today. In 1938, after her father bought a house in the south side of Chicago, the family was subject to the wrath of their white neighbors, resulting in U.S. Supreme CourtsHansberry v. Leecase. Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in a family that was deeply involved in the civil rights movement. He looked insulted--seemed to feel that he had been wasting his time . 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. Lorraine Hansberry, a celebrated African American playwright and writer, was not openly gay during her lifetime. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 US Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. Lorraine's father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a real-estate speculator and a proud race man. The play was the first one to be produced on Broadway by an African-American woman and won an award at the Cannes Film Festival when its motion picture came out. 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. In his remarks, President Obama noted that Lorraine Hansberry refused to be confined by any identity but her own, and helped blaze a trail for generations of Americans who have been inspired by her example.. This gave her a platform for sharing her views. . After moving to New York City, she held various minor jobs and studied at theNew School for Social Researchwhile refining her writing skills. 16 queer Black trailblazers who made history - NBC News - Breaking News 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. 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! Background and Criticism of A Raisin in the Sun Follow her on Twitter at@emilykpowers. September 27, 2022. She extended her hand. Her mother, Nannie Hansberry, was a schoolteacher and a member of the NAACP. Sadly, she passed away from pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965. The Hansberry Project is rooted in the convictions that black artists should be at the center of the artistic process, that the community deserves excellence in its art, and that theatre's fundamental function is to put people in a relationship with one another. . A satire involving miscegenation, the $400,000 production was co-produced by her husband Robert Nemiroff. Born in 1930, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was the youngest of Carl and Nannie Hansberry's four children. Lorraine Hansberry | National Women's History Museum Both of these talented writers wanted to incorporate themes of race and sexual identity into their stage work, something that was considered quite radical at the time. 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. In 1938, the family moved to a white neighborhood and was violently attacked by its inhabitants but the former refused to vacate the area until ordered to do so by the Supreme Court where the case was addressed as Hansberry v. Lee. The latter's legal efforts to force the Hansberry family out culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940). Along these lines, she wrote a critical review of Richard Wright's The Outsider and went on to style her final play Les Blancs as a foil to Jean Genet's absurdist Les Ngres. With the help of the NAACP, he eventually won the right to stay, but never recovered from the emotional stress of their legal battles ("Lorraine Hansberry";Hansberry 21). At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. 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." . Lorraine Hansberry's Remarkable Renaissance Is Timely, Exciting Lorraine Hansberry, (born May 19, 1930, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.died January 12, 1965, New York, New York), American playwright whose A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first drama by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. . Hansberry may not have finished college, but she went on to make significant contributions to American culture and society through her art and activism. The New York Drama Critics Circle Award (NYDCC) is an annual award given by an organization composed of theatre critics who review plays and musicals in New York City. 236 pp. 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. On June 9, 2022, the Lilly Awards Foundation unveiled a statue of Hansberry in Times Square. After moving to New York City, she held various minor jobs and studied at the New School for Social Research while refining her writing skills. The play opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, and was a great success. Before her death, she built a circle of gay and lesbian friends, took several lovers, vacationed in Provincetown (where she enjoyed, in her words, "a gathering of the clan"), and subscribed to several homophile magazines. In addition to her activism around civil rights, Hansberry was also a feminist and an advocate for womens rights. He gathered her unpublished writings and first adapted them into a stage play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which ran off Broadway from 1968 to 1969. Not only did Hansberry address social and racial issues in her novels and plays, but she also wrote articles true to her voice and beliefs for a progressive Black journal, Freedom, concerning governmental issues. . . Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate broker and Nannie Louise (born Perry), a driving school teacher and ward committeewoman. In the same year, her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window, was released on Broadway but was unable to become a major hit. Lorraine Hansberry's 'Les Blancs' Is A Radical Last - HuffPost Top 10 Interesting Facts about Lorraine Hansberry In 2004, A Raisin in the Sun was revived on Broadway in a production starring Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, Phylicia Rashad, and Audra McDonald, and directed by Kenny Leon. A New Biography of a Brilliant Playwright Who Died Too Young 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. MLS # 3441616 A Raisin in the Sun - Wikipedia Lorraine believed that the artists voice in whatever medium was to be as an agent for social change. Lorraine Hansberry Biography - CliffsNotes . Faced . Lorraine Hansberry was deeply influenced by her uncles activism and scholarship, and her work often reflected her own commitment to social justice and civil rights for African Americans. A Raisin in the Sun, her most famous work, debuted on Broadway in 1959 and was the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. Lorraine Hansberry, the author of A Raisin in the Sun, grew up in an activist family. The African-American historian and scholar who is best known for his research on African history and culture. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. . She left behind an unfinished novel and several other plays, including The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers?, with a range of content, from slavery to a post-apocalyptic future. Lorraine Hansberry - Biography and Facts Hansberry's writings also discussed her lesbianism and the oppression of homosexuality. Discover the life of Lorraine Hansberry, who reported on civil rights for Paul Robeson's newspaper Freedom and later penned "A Raisin in the Sun". Lorraine Hansberry - Biography and Literary Works of Lorraine Hansberry . She wrote about her experiences as a lesbian in her unpublished journals and letters. 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. Fifteen years before Lorraine was unsealed, Harris meticulously and accurately charted Hansberry's queer life; she did not rely on institutions, but New York City dykes. Her other works include the plays The Sign in Sidney Brusteins Window and Les Blancs, as well as several essays and articles on civil rights and social justice issues. Lorraine Hansberry (19301965) was a playwright, writer, and activist. 10 Best Books to Read About African History. Her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a. When Lorraine was seven years old, the family bought a house in a mostly white neighborhood. After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Also in 2013, Hansberry was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. In 2010, Hansberry was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. Fact 1: The one fact you might already know! Leo Hansberry was a prominent figure in the Pan-Africanist movement, and he founded the African Civilization section at Howard University, where he was a professor of African history. Lorraine Hansberry: The Life Behind A Raisin in the Sun - Macmillan Lorraines papers, including her letters and unpublished works, were private for years, with the public hearing only whispers or half-formed truths about some of the most significant aspects of Lorraines identity: her sexuality and her radical political leanings. Lorraine Hansberry Elementary School was located in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Additionally, she wrote scripts at Freedom. Hansberry's. The following year, she collaborated with the already produced playwright Alice Childress, who also wrote for Freedom, on a pageant for its Negro History Festival, with Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Douglas Turner Ward, and John O. Killens. Lorraine Hansberry: Lorraine Hansberry was a gifted playwright and creator of the award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1930. . Hansberry was invited to meet Robert F. Kennedy (then U.S. Attorney General) in May, 1963 due to the work she had done as a Civil Rights activist, but declined the invitation. She admonished the Kennedy administration to be more active in addressing the problem of segregation in the community. The Brief, Brilliant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry Hansberrys work as a writer and activist was groundbreaking in its exploration of the experiences of African American women. Due to racial differences, Lorraine and her family faced racism when she was just eight. She was also the youngest playwright and the first Black winner of the prestigious Drama Critic's Circle Award for Best Play. It is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes [in the parlance of the time], and life. She moved to New York City and became involved in the arts scene, working as a writer and editor for various publications. They must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on stepsand shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities. The original Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun was directed by Lloyd Richards and starred Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger, the head of the household. . The fascinating facts about Lorraine Hansberry following illustrate her development as a Black woman, activist, and writer. A Raisin in the Sun portrays a few weeks in the life of the Youngers, a Black family living on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. She was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. Lorraine Hansberry - Kids | Britannica Kids | Homework Help She was later quoted as saying that American racism helped kill him.. I am in Houston and may go see Clybourne Park at the Midtown A&T Center before I leave town next week. Her own familys landmark court case against discriminatory real estate covenants in Chicago would serve as inspiration for her seminal Broadway play, A Raisin in the Sun. McKissack, Patricia C. and Fredrick L. Young, Black and Determined: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. And I am glad she was not smiling at me. The Many Visions of Lorraine Hansberry | The New Yorker Lorraine Hansberry LGBT African Americans (2014) by Kali Henderson She was an anti-colonialist before independence had been won in Africa and the Caribbean.. Lorraine Hansberry - Blackfacts.com Who Was Lorraine Hansberry? Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. Thanks for reading! Lorraine Hansberry was an African-American playwright, writer and activist who lived from 1930 to 1965. The award-winning playwright whose 90th birthday would have been this week first captured the public eye during the civil rights movement. In 1957, around the time she separated from Nemiroff, Hansberry contacted the Daughters of Bilitis, the San Francisco-based lesbian rights organization, contributing two letters to their magazine, The Ladder, both of which were published under her initials, first "L.H.N." That was what formed their bond at the time when Lorraine was developing her own Black, feminist, and queer politics. Fact 2: Lorraine was raised in the South Side of Chicago. Biography & MemoirDisability 519 (1934), had been similar to his situation. Perry explains that though the term radical has negative associations, for Lorraine, American radicalism was both a passion and a commitment. In 1964, Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced but continued to work together. | She is remembered for her first play, A Raisin in the Sun, which opened on Broadway in 1959, just six years before her death - and sometimes for her memoir, which was the inspiration for Nina Simone . In 1959, Hansberry made history as the first African American woman to have a show produced on BroadwayA Raisin in the Sun. While many of her other writings were published in her lifetime essays, articles, and the text for the SNCC book The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality the only other play given a contemporary production was The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. It went on to inspire generations of playwrights and performers. All rights reserved, Playbill Inc. National Museum of African American History & Culture. Image by Unknown Author from Wikimedia. She was also a civil rights activist and a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). . The local Chicago government was willing to eject the Hansberrys from their new home but Lorraine's father, Carl Hansberry, took their case to court. Hansberry was also a prominent civil rights activist, and her writing and activism helped to shape the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. The granddaughter of a slave and the niece of a prominent African-American professor, Hansberry grew up with a keen awareness of African-American history and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. This is her earliest remaining theatrical work. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The success of the hit pop song "Cindy, Oh Cindy", co-authored by Nemiroff, enabled Hansberry to start writing full-time. ft. home is a 3 bed, 2.0 bath property. If people know anything about Lorraine (Perry refers to her as Lorraine throughout the book, explaining why she does so), theyll recall she was the author of A Raisin in the Sun, an award-winning play about a family dealing with issues of race, class, education, and identity in Chicago. . In 2013, more than twenty years after Nemiroff's death, the new executor released the restricted material to scholar Kevin J. Mumford. between family and gender expectations and the way homophobia could crush intimacies in the most heartbreaking of ways even as romantic love made space for them (86). Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) was born on this day, May 19. She was also an active participant in the civil rights movement, and her writings and speeches inspired many people to take action against racial inequality and injustice. Lorraine Hansberry - Facts, Bio, Favorites, Info, Family - Sticky Facts In the whole world you know Hansberry worked on not only the US civil rights movement, but also global struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Genre Realist drama. 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. On June 20, 1953, Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish publisher, songwriter, and political activist. Image by The Public Domain Review from Wikimedia. Her father, Carl Hansberry was an activist who fought against racial discrimination in housing. Her mother, Nannie Perry, was a schoolteacher active in the Republican Party. Lorraine Hansberry Speaks! Image by Eden, Janine and Jim from Wikimedia. The title of the song refers to the title of Hansberry's autobiography, which Hansberry first coined when speaking to the winners of a creative writing conference on May 1, 1964: "Though it is a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic to be young, gifted and black." Du Bois. Lorraine Hansberry: Her Chicago law story Religion Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. The play was also nominated for four Tony Awards, including Best Play, and it has since become a classic of American theatre. Written when she was just twenty-eight, Lorraine Hansberry's landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed . Hansberry originally wanted to be an artist when she attended the University of Wisconsin, but soon changed her focus to study drama and stage design. Her friend Nina Simone said, we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. Among the likes: her homosexuality, Eartha Kitt, and that first drink of Scotch. Du Bois, the Civil Rights activist, author, sociologist, and historian, and Paul Robeson, the musician and actor, were friends of the Hansberry family. She got her start in her hometown of Tryon, North Carolina, where she played gospel hymns and classical music at Old St. Luke's CME, the church where her mother ministered. Here are five important facts about her that you most likely didnt know. She was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, among the four Tony Awards that the play was nominated for in 1960. Drake Facts. . She identified as a lesbian and thought about LGBT organizing before there was a gay rights movement. View more property details, sales history and Zestimate data on Zillow. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Even though her disease brought her career to an abrupt halt, Lorraine Hansberry continues to be remembered through the paintings and writings which she worked on in the early years of her career. Risking public censure and process of being outed to the larger community, she joined the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization, and submitted letters and short stories to queer publications Ladder and ONE. Lorraine Hansberry, likely at a welcoming event for the African-American Students Foundation in 1959. In 1959 her play A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway, an important theater district in New York City. In doing so, he blocked access to all materials related to Hansberry's lesbianism, meaning that no scholars or biographers had access for more than 50 years. Lorraine Hansberry was born at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago on May 19, 1930. She spoke out against discrimination and prejudice in all forms, including homophobia and transphobia. Since its original production, A Raisin in the Sun has been revived on Broadway several times, most recently in 2014 with Denzel Washington as Walter Lee Younger. Taken from us far too soon. Lorraine Hansberry became involved in the Civil Rights Movement in 1963 and joined people like Lena Horne and James Baldwin to test Robert Kennedy's position on civil rights. While she struggled privately to maintain her health, Lorraine never quelled her radicalism and role in the liberation. . Her most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, is an exploration of the challenges faced by a black family in Chicago as they struggle to achieve the American Dream in the face of systemic racism and poverty.