“Never be afraid to sit
a while and think.” |
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Lorraine Hansberry
(1930-1965) — Playwright, Writer
By Bob Hilson
When she was 8, Lorraine Hansberry and her family moved to a predominantly white section in Chicago’s South Side, where they received numerous threats — including a brick thrown through their window — before being forced to move.
Though young, the memory stuck vividly with Hansberry, as she recalled the hard times of her childhood in her landmark play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” an extraordinarily realistic story of struggling black parents raising a family in Chicago.
Award for Best Play
The play opened on Broadway in 1959, making Hansberry, then 29, the first African American female playwright to have a play produced on Broadway. The play’s success made Hansberry the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play.
A film version of “A Raisin in the Sun” starring Sidney Poitier was completed in 1961 and won an award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. The National Theatre lists “A Raisin in the Sun” as one of the 20th century’s 100 most significant works.
Hansberry’s masterpiece is also credited for helping to pave the way for other African American playwrights.
Born in Chicago in 1930, Hansberry was raised in a middle-class family, and the Hansberry home had many prominent African American leaders visit, including scholar W.E.B. DuBois, activist Paul Robeson, musician Duke Ellington, Olympian Jesse Owens and poet Langston Hughes. (A line from one of Langston Hughes’ poems provided the title for “A Raisin in the Sun”: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”)
Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin from 1948 to 1950, the School of Art Institute of Chicago and Roosevelt University in Chicago before settling in New York.
Her second play, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” a drama about a Jewish intellectual, ran on Broadway for 101 performances and received mixed reviews. It closed on Jan. 12, 1965, the day Hansberry died from cancer at age 34.
“Raisin,” a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, opened in New York in 1973 and won a To ny Award for Best Musical. “A Raisin in the Sun” was revived on Broadway in 2004 and earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Revival of a Play.
In 1970, a collection of Hansberry’s unpublished speeches, writings and journal entries were edited and presented in a montage titled “To Be Young Gifted and Black,” the title taken from a speech that Hansberry delivered a year before her death to winners of the United Negro Fund writing competition.
Hansberry’s speech read in part: “. . . though it be [a] thrilling and marvelous thing to be merelyyoung and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic, to be young, gifted and black!”
She was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre of Fame in 2013.
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