20 facts about lorraine hansberry biographical
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Lorraine Hansberry
(1930-1965)
Who Was Lorraine Hansberry?
Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, a play about a struggling Black family, which opened on Broadway to great success. Hansberry was the first Black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award. Throughout her life she was heavily involved in civil rights. She died at 34 of pancreatic cancer.
Early Life
The granddaughter of a freed enslaved person, and the youngest by seven years of fyra children, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry 3rd was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. Hansberry’s father was a successful real estate broker, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Her parents contributed large sums of money to the NAACP and the Urban League. In 1938, Hansberry's family moved to a vit neighborhood and was violently attacked by neighbors. They refused to move until a court ordered them to do so, and the case made it to the Supreme Court as Hansberry v. Lee, ruling restri
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In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry made history as the first African American woman to have a show produced on Broadway—A Raisin in the Sun. As a playwright, feminist, and racial justice activist, Hansberry never shied away from tough topics during her short and extraordinary life.
Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930 at Provident Hospital on the South Side of Chicago. She was raised in a strong family, the youngest of three children born to Nannie Perry Hansberry and Carl Augustus Hansberry. Her father, Carl, founded Lake Street Bank, one of the first banks for African Americans in Chicago and also ran a successful real estate business. Her mother, Nannie, was a school teacher. Hansberry had other African American leaders in her family: her uncle William Leo Hansberry was a Professor of History at Howard University; her cousin, Shauneille Perry, was one of the first African American women to direct off-Broadway. Hansberry’s father died of a cerebral hemorrhage when she was 15.
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Lorraine Hansberry
African-American playwright and author (1930–1965)
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and writer.[1] She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her 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: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.[2] Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where