Lorraine Hansberry: Biography and Background

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and civil rights activist. She was the first Black American female author to have a play performed on Broadway.

Hansberry's best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes. At the age of 29, Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, making her the first Black American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Her family challenged a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.

After moving to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other Black intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of Hansberry's work during this time concerned the decolonization of Africa and its impact on the world. She also wrote about the oppression of women and gay people. Hansberry died in 1965 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34, two days after the end of the Broadway run of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. A line from one of Hansberry's speeches inspired the Nina Simone song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black".

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