American playwright of A Raisin in the Sun and one of James Baldwin's closest friends; after her death at thirty-four he remembered her in the essay Sweet Lorraine.
Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the 1959 drama of a Black family on Chicago's South Side that was the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway. She was twenty-eight when it opened and dead of cancer six years later, the shortest life among the writers around James Baldwin, who called her his sister and his comrade. In between she wrote for Paul Robeson's newspaper, argued with Robert Kennedy in a room Baldwin had filled, and tutored Nina Simone in politics.
Hansberry was born on 19 May 1930 on Chicago's South Side, the youngest of the four children of Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real-estate broker who founded one of the city's Black-owned banks, and Nannie Louise Perry, a schoolteacher. In 1938 her father bought a house in the Washington Park subdivision, a neighborhood closed to Black buyers by a restrictive covenant. A white mob gathered, and a brick thrown through a window narrowly missed the eight-year-old Lorraine.
Her father fought the covenant to the United States Supreme Court, which decided Hansberry v. Lee in his favor in 1940 on narrow procedural grounds. The ruling did not strike down restrictive covenants, but it opened some thirty blocks of the South Side to Black families. Hansberry graduated from Englewood High School in 1948 and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, which she left without a degree.
She moved to New York in 1950 and joined the staff of Freedom, the Harlem newspaper Paul Robeson published, in 1951, writing under its editor Louis E. Burnham in a circle that included W. E. B. Du Bois. On a 1952 picket line protesting discrimination at New York University she met Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer and publisher; they married in Chicago on 20 June 1953.
In 1957 she sent two letters to The Ladder, the magazine of the lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, signed with her married initials, L.H.N. The letters supported the group and drew analogies between the struggles of women, of lesbians, and of Black Americans. She never spoke publicly about her sexuality; diaries and papers her estate unsealed in 2013 record that she was a lesbian. The marriage ended quietly. She and Nemiroff separated in 1957 and divorced in Mexico in March 1964, telling few people, and he remained her producer and closest collaborator until her death.
A Raisin in the Sun follows the Youngers, a working-class Black family on the South Side deciding what to do with a ten-thousand-dollar life-insurance check, part of which buys a house in a white neighborhood. The material came from her own city and her own family's fight, and she took the title from Harlem, the Langston Hughes poem that asks what happens to a dream deferred. Of Beneatha, the play's college-age daughter, she said: "Beneatha is me, eight years ago."
The play opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 11 March 1959, with Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Claudia McNeil in the cast, and ran for 530 performances. It carried several firsts at once:
She met James Baldwin in the winter of 1958, at a workshop production of Giovanni's Room, his novel then being tried on the stage, and the two stayed close for the rest of her life. In January 1961 she sat with Baldwin and Langston Hughes on a WBAI radio panel on the Black writer in America, alongside the critics Alfred Kazin and Emile Capouya; the recording survives. Nina Simone counted her as her closest political tutor — with Hansberry, Simone recalled, "it was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls' talk" — and the two attended organizing meetings together in New York.
On 24 May 1963 she joined the delegation Baldwin assembled, Harry Belafonte among them, to meet Attorney General Robert Kennedy in a Kennedy family apartment on Central Park South. The administration's caution met the movement's urgency and no consensus was reached; it was Hansberry who ended the meeting, telling Kennedy goodbye and walking out, with the rest of the room behind her.[1]
By then she was ill with pancreatic cancer. Her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, about a Jewish intellectual in Greenwich Village, opened at the Longacre Theatre on 15 October 1964 to mixed reviews and thin box office; supporters raised money to keep it running while she was hospitalized from October on. The production closed on 12 January 1965, after 101 performances, the day she died at University Hospital in Manhattan. She was thirty-four. Her funeral was held in Harlem three days later — Paul Robeson gave the eulogy, and Malcolm X was among the mourners — and she was buried in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
Nemiroff, her literary executor, assembled her letters, journals, and unfinished work into To Be Young, Gifted and Black, staged in 1969. The phrase was her own, from a speech she gave on 1 May 1964 to the young winners of a United Negro College Fund creative-writing contest, and Nina Simone's anthem To Be Young, Gifted and Black took its title from the play. Baldwin remembered her in his tribute essay Sweet Lorraine.
I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade.[2]
Hansberry could write A Raisin in the Sun full time because of a pop song.
Her husband Robert Nemiroff wrote Cindy, Oh Cindy with Burt D'Lugoff, the two of them credited under the names Robert Barron and Burt Long. Vince Martin recorded it with the Tarriers in 1956 and Eddie Fisher covered it, and it was a hit twice over. The royalties were enough for both Nemiroff and Hansberry to leave their jobs, and she gave up the part-time work she had been doing and wrote.
Lorraine Hansberry finished A Raisin in the Sun in 1957 and read it aloud to friends in her Greenwich Village apartment. Philip Rose, a record producer with no theatrical experience, optioned it the next morning. He then spent a year and a half failing to raise Broadway money for a play about a Black family. In the end he toured it to New Haven, Philadelphia and Chicago, and brought it in on the strength of the reviews.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a file on Lorraine Hansberry in 1952, when she was twenty-one, and kept it for the rest of her life.
Hansberry had gone to a peace congress in Montevideo in place of the singer Paul Robeson, after the State Department refused him a passport. She had written for a paper the FBI regarded as subversive and spoken at meetings it monitored. In February 1959 the Bureau sent an agent to a Philadelphia preview of A Raisin in the Sun, weeks before it reached Broadway, to assess whether the play carried communist propaganda. His report concluded that it did not.
The FBI's file on Hansberry ran to over a thousand pages. It is now one of the more complete records of where she went and what she said in public, assembled by people who were hoping to use it against her.
Hansberry was working on Les Blancs, set in Zatembe, a fictional African country, during an anti-colonial uprising, when she became too ill to continue. It is the most direct thing she wrote about anti-colonial violence, and it argues that the violence cannot be wished away by good intentions.
She died at University Hospital in New York on 12 January 1965, of pancreatic cancer, at thirty-four. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window had given its last performance two days earlier, on 10 January, after a hundred and one that friends had kept alive by passing a hat.
Robert Nemiroff, from whom Lorraine Hansberry had been divorced the year before, was her literary executor. He finished Les Blancs from her drafts and it was staged on Broadway in 1970, and he spent the next twenty years bringing the rest of the unpublished work out.
Born on 19 May on Chicago's South Side, youngest child of a real-estate broker and a schoolteacher.
Her father buys a house in the covenant-restricted Washington Park subdivision; the fight reaches the Supreme Court as Hansberry v. Lee, decided in the family's favor in 1940.
Joins the staff of Freedom, Paul Robeson's Harlem newspaper, after moving to New York the year before.
The FBI opens a file on Hansberry, at twenty-one, and keeps it for the rest of her life. It runs to over a thousand pages.
Marries Robert Nemiroff in Chicago on 20 June.
Cindy, Oh Cindy, written by her husband Robert Nemiroff with Burt D'Lugoff under pen names, is a hit for Vince Martin and then Eddie Fisher. The royalties let her write full time.
Finishes A Raisin in the Sun and reads it aloud to friends. Philip Rose options it the next morning.
A Raisin in the Sun opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 11 March — the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway — and wins the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.
Sits on a WBAI radio panel on the Black writer in America with Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.
Joins Baldwin's delegation to meet Attorney General Robert Kennedy on 24 May, and is the one who ends the meeting by walking out.
Gives the speech that coins "young, gifted and Black" on 1 May; The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window opens at the Longacre Theatre on 15 October; she and Nemiroff quietly divorce in Mexico.
Dies of pancreatic cancer in New York on 12 January, at thirty-four, the day her second play closes; Paul Robeson gives the eulogy at her Harlem funeral.
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window gives its last performance on 10 January, after a hundred and one.
Dies at University Hospital in New York on 12 January, of pancreatic cancer, at thirty-four.
Nemiroff, her literary executor, stages To Be Young, Gifted and Black from her unpublished writings.
Les Blancs, finished by Nemiroff from her drafts, is staged on Broadway.
Met · 1961
Both sat on the January 1961 WBAI radio panel on the Black writer in America, with James Baldwin, Alfred Kazin, and Emile Capouya. The recording survives in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Met · 1958
They first met in the winter of 1958 at a workshop production of Giovanni's Room and stayed close until Hansberry's death from cancer in 1965, at thirty-four. In his tribute essay Sweet Lorraine, Baldwin wrote: I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade.
Met · 1963
Both sat in James Baldwin's delegation at the 24 May 1963 meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the room where the administration's caution met the movement's urgency and no consensus was reached.
Met
Hansberry was Simone's closest political tutor — "it was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls' talk," Simone recalled — and the friend with whom she attended organizing meetings in New York. Simone's anthem To Be Young, Gifted and Black took its title from Hansberry's unfinished autobiographical play.
An American playwright, born in Chicago in 1930, whose drama A Raisin in the Sun (1959) was the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway. She wrote for Paul Robeson's newspaper Freedom, was a close friend of James Baldwin and Nina Simone, and died of pancreatic cancer in 1965 at thirty-four.
Lorraine Hansberry's play follows the Youngers, a fictional working-class Black family on Chicago's South Side, as they decide what to do with a ten-thousand-dollar life-insurance check left by the father's death — the mother uses part of it to buy a house in a white neighborhood. Hansberry drew on her own family's history: her father's purchase of a home in a restricted Chicago neighborhood led to the 1940 Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. The title comes from Harlem, the Langston Hughes poem that asks whether a dream deferred dries up like a raisin in the sun.
Of pancreatic cancer, at University Hospital in Manhattan on 12 January 1965. She was thirty-four. She had been hospitalized since October 1964, while supporters raised money to keep her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window running on Broadway; the production closed the day she died, after 101 performances. Paul Robeson gave the eulogy at her Harlem funeral, and she is buried in Croton-on-Hudson, New York.
From a speech Lorraine Hansberry gave in New York on 1 May 1964 to the young winners of a United Negro College Fund creative-writing contest, in which she told them it was "doubly dynamic" to be young, gifted, and Black. After her death, Robert Nemiroff used the phrase as the title of the 1969 stage portrait he assembled from her writings, and Nina Simone's anthem To Be Young, Gifted and Black took its title from the play.
They were close friends from the winter of 1958, when they met at a workshop production of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, until her death in 1965. She joined the delegation Baldwin assembled to confront Attorney General Robert Kennedy in May 1963, and ended the meeting by walking out. Baldwin remembered her in the tribute essay Sweet Lorraine, writing that he loved her and that she was his sister and comrade.
Yes. She married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer and publisher she met on a New York picket line, on 20 June 1953; they separated in 1957 and divorced quietly in Mexico in March 1964, and he remained her producer, collaborator, and literary executor. In 1957 she also wrote two letters, signed with her initials, to The Ladder, the magazine of the lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis; diaries her estate unsealed in 2013 record that she was a lesbian, which she never stated publicly in her lifetime.
Through a pop song. Her husband Robert Nemiroff wrote Cindy, Oh Cindy with Burt D'Lugoff under pen names; Vince Martin recorded it in 1956 and Eddie Fisher covered it, and the royalties let them both leave their jobs. She finished the play in 1957 and read it aloud to friends. The record producer Philip Rose optioned it the next morning, spent eighteen months failing to raise Broadway money, then toured it and brought it in on the reviews.
Yes, from 1952, when she was twenty-one, until her death, running to over a thousand pages. In February 1959 the Bureau sent an agent to a Philadelphia preview of A Raisin in the Sun to assess whether it carried communist propaganda; his report concluded it did not. The file is now one of the fullest records of where she went and what she said in public.
The play Hansberry was working on when she became too ill to continue, set in Zatembe, a fictional African country, during an anti-colonial uprising. It is the most direct thing she wrote about anti-colonial violence. Robert Nemiroff finished it from her drafts and it was staged on Broadway in 1970.
On 12 January 1965, at University Hospital in New York, of pancreatic cancer, aged thirty-four. Her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, had given its last performance two days earlier, after a hundred and one that friends had kept running by passing a hat.
Met · 1961
Both sat on the January 1961 WBAI radio panel on the Black writer in America, with James Baldwin, Alfred Kazin, and Emile Capouya. The recording survives in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.
Met · 1958
They first met in the winter of 1958 at a workshop production of Giovanni's Room and stayed close until Hansberry's death from cancer in 1965, at thirty-four. In his tribute essay Sweet Lorraine, Baldwin wrote: I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade.
Met · 1963
Both sat in James Baldwin's delegation at the 24 May 1963 meeting with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the room where the administration's caution met the movement's urgency and no consensus was reached.
Met
Hansberry was Simone's closest political tutor — "it was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls' talk," Simone recalled — and the friend with whom she attended organizing meetings in New York. Simone's anthem To Be Young, Gifted and Black took its title from Hansberry's unfinished autobiographical play.
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The Schomburg Center's finding aid for her papers: the writings, journals, diaries and correspondence, and the scripts for A Raisin in the Sun, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window and Les Blancs.
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