Lorraine Hansberry — Black American Revolutionary Playwright
“To Be Young, Gifted and Black”
We know her as the beloved and talented author of the play, A Raisin In the Sun, but we don’t know that at the age of 8, Lorraine Hansberry dodged a brick thrown through a window of her family’s Chicago home.
Her upper-middle-class parents had bought a house in an all-white neighborhood and the racists had sent them a you’re-not-so-welcome welcoming committee.
We are not taught that at the age of 18, in 1948, Lorraine entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison and became involved in protests to integrate the dormitories. Her classmate, Bob Teague, remembered her as “the only girl I knew who could whip together a fresh picket sign with her own hands, at a moment's notice, for any cause or occasion.”
We are not taught that four years later, the FBI opened a file on her when Lorraine Hansberry moved to New York City.
“For above all, on behalf of an ailing world which sorely needs our defiance, may we, as Negroes or women, never accept the notion of our place”~Lorraine Hansberry
The work she is most well known for, A Raisin in the Sun, was even monitored…
