Celebrating Lorraine Hansberry, Award-Winning Playwright and Activist, Born on this Day in 1930

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Many may know Lorraine Hansberry as the award-winning playwright of the now-classic 1959 Broadway play A Raisin in The Sun, adapted into a 1961 movie starring Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in 1961, and remade for television in 2008 starring Phylicia Rashad, Audra McDonald, Sanaa Lathan and Sean Combs.

Some may know of her family’s fight to end restrictive housing covenants in Chicago that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court (Hansberry v. Lee), or of her civil rights activism and advocacy for universal healthcare, women’s rights, and for the demise of colonialism and imperialism.

A few may even know of her embrace of her queer identity and desire to fight for gay rights at the end of her life.

I know all of these things because my personal connection to Lorraine Hansberry started when she became the first (and only) Black woman writer I got to read as a part of English curriculum in either middle school or high school in the 1980s.

We read Raisin In The Sun as a class in 11th grade AP English. So when my teacher Dr. Victor had his students spend our spring semester studying one author in depth of our own choosing, I chose Lorraine.

When I read Raisin, A Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, the never-produced NBC TV script for The Drinking Gourd, Les Blancs and especially, To Be Young, Gifted and Black — a phrase she employed when speaking to youth just weeks before her death — Hansberry’s work filled me with hope, possibility and inspired me to believe I could become a writer as well. (This is why REPRESENTATION MATTERS!)

In addition to being a vastly talented writer, Hansberry was a searing beast of an intellectual. One of the greatest thrills of my own intellectual life was finding and listening to The Lorraine Hansberry Audio Collection on cassette tape and in particular wearing out her interview with Mike Wallace entitled “The Beauty of Things Black-Towards Total Liberation.”

In it, she masterfully counters his presumptions and condescension about racism and race relations with brilliance, prowess, coolness and confidence. I got lifted every time I heard it and her voice.

Even though she died at the way-too-young age of 34, Lorraine Hansberry made her mark as one of the great American playwrights, thinkers and liberation fighters.

Nina Simone was inspired to compose (with lyricist Weldon Irvine) “Young, Gifted and Black” to honor her friend by crafting a song that would “make Black children all over the world feel good about themselves forever.” I was most definitely one of them.

To learn more about Lorraine Hansberry, check out the Audio Collection mentioned above, the 2018 PBS American Masters documentary Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,.

You can also read about her in the Imani Perry biography from 2018, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry.

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