Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry was the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. She dedicated her life to pursuing racial and sexual equality in the United States. Hansberry was born into a middle-class family on the south side of Chicago in 1930. She recalled her childhood as a happy one: "The insulation of life within the Southside ghetto, of what must have easily been half a million people, protected me from some of the harsher and more bestial aspects of white-supremacist culture." When Hansberry was around eight years old, her family fought to live in a restricted white area and they were granted the permission to live in the area. However, they had to live through various violent actions and threats by angry neighbors. This incident gave Hansberry a very positive opinion of her parents. She became interested in theatre when she was in high school. "Mine was the same old story-" she recollected, "sort of hanging around little acting groups, and developing the feeling that the theatre embraces everything I liked all at one time." As she furthered her education at the University of Wisconsin, she became even more acquainted with great theatre.
being heavily criticized. It was not until the 1980s that feminist scholars began connecting her feminist vision with her lesbian identity. A Raisin in the Sun basically tells the story of a black After her initial success she lived only six years. She was only able to complete only one more play, a movie and television script which was too racially controversial to be aired. Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, was received with mixed reviews and kept open for 101 performances only by the contributions and support of the theatre community. It closed the night she died at age 34 from cancer. After her death, Nemiroff finished and produced her final work, Les Blancs, a play about African liberation. Hansberry had begun to claim her identity as a lesbian in a 1957 letter to a lesbian periodical, The Ladder. This information and her 1964 divorce from Nemiroff was not widely known at the time of her death. In 1965 the Gay Liberation Movement did not exist and a woman could not claim such an identity without orraine Hansberry moved to New York City in 1950 to begin her career as a writer. She wrote for Paul Robeson's Freedom magazine and participated in various liberal crusades. At
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