Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

Book Cover: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

by Imani Perry

Imani Perry being interviewed for PBS November 2018

1 Lorraine Hansberry was the first African American female author to have a play produced on Broadway. Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was also staged on Broadway, but had a much shorter run.

2 The title of her play: A Raisin in the Sun is taken from a Langston Hughes poem with the line:

“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”

Lorraine’s own family had moved into a white neighborhood in Chicago. The neighborhood had a “restrictive covenant.” Ta Nehesi Coates discussed these covenants in the book We Were Eight Years in Power. White angry mobs threw bricks into the Hansberry’s windows. Lorraine’s father, Carl Hansberry, took his case all the way to the supreme court.

4 Lorraine Hansberry coined the phrase “Young Gifted and Black” while giving a speech to the winners of a creative writing conference. This slogan was used in a song first by Nina Simone and later Aretha Franklin.

5 Lorraine left the University of Wisconsin and went to New York where she wrote for the Freedom Newspaper, which was edited by Paul Robeson. She was also mentored by W.E.B. Dubois and Langston Hughes.

6 She joined Attorney General Robert Kennedy, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, and others to a meeting to discuss the racial unrest that was going on in the South. Michael Eric Dyson described this meeting in the book, What Truth Sounds Like: RFK, James Baldwin, and our Unfinished Conversation about Race in America.

7 She was married to Robert Nemiroff for eight years. Although they lived separately, he was the one to take care of her as she was dying. He (and his second wife) also carefully maintained her papers, preserving Lorraine’s legacy.

8 Her best friends were James Baldwin and Nina Simone.

9 She wrote for a lesbian journal under a pseudonym.

1 She was a communist and was constantly surveilled by the FBI.

1 Ms. Hansberry died in January 1965 at the age of 34.

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