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Lorraine Hansberry
- University of Illinois Press
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lorraine hansBerry (May 19, 1930–January 12, 1965) lisbeth lipari Although chiefly known as an award-winning dramatist and author of the classic Broadway hit A Raisin in the Sun (produced in 1959), Lorraine Hansberry was a significant voice in the Civil Rights era. Beyond her playwriting, Hansberry wrote journalism, essays, and public letters, and gave speeches as well as radio and television interviews. Her chosen genre of drama, however, may have been shaped at least in part by the Chicago Renaissance school’s stylistic emphases on urban speech and spoken language. Like the Chicago Renaissance’s principal figure, Richard Wright, who wrote for the Daily Worker and New Masses, Hansberry ’s early work as a journalist enabled her to draw upon underlying Black aesthetic traditions that employ spoken language as a means of producing what Lawrence Rodgers claims as Chicago’s unique heritage as the home base of the “new vocabulary of documentary realism, sociological detail and violent black agency”1 with which to portray Black urban America. As a younger member of the Chicago Renaissance, Hansberry’s work drew upon both aesthetic and political traditions of the city such as the poetic inspirations of blues and jazz, the political and sociological realism of Wright, and the modernist, womanist breadth of Marita Bonner. Doris Abramson notes the similarity between Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Wright’s Native Son by observing that both works are set in Chicago’s South Side, that both of the central male characters (Walter Lee Younger and Bigger Thomas) work as chauffeurs and that in reaction to racism both characters explode, albeit in different ways.2 Like Bonner, and her Chicago predecessor Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hansberry’s writing took on the triple jeopardy of race, class, and gender oppression with uncompromising vitality and conviction . Whether exploring topics such as African colonialism or American racism, her writings spoke against the poison of all oppressions, including sexism and homophobia. Jewelle L. Gomez writes that “many critics have neglected the full ramifications of Hansberry’s life as a cultural worker” and that contemporary scholars have yet to “rediscover the depth and breadth of Hansberry’s social and political concerns and to see how they are manifest in her work.”3 194 • lisBeth liPari Although Hansberry died tragically in 1965 of cancer at the age of 34, her dramatic writing continues to be read, produced, and discussed throughout the world. In addition to her plays A Raisin in the Sun (1959), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1965), Robert Nemiroff’s posthumous adaptation of her writings To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969), and her posthumously published Les Blancs (1972), The Drinking Gourd (1972), and What Use Are the Flowers (1972), Hansberry was an active writer and speaker. As a public intellectual, she wrote public letters to The Ladder, the New York Times, and The Village Voice. Her writings, interviews, and speeches were published in the the Black Scholar, Commentary, Cross Currents, Ebony, Esquire, Freedom, Freedomways, Liberation, Masses and Mainstream, The Monthly Review, Negro Digest, Theater Arts, and The Village Voice. She gave speeches at New York’s Town Hall, the American Academy of Psycho-Therapists, the American Society of African Culture, the United Negro College Fund, and, at age 22, to the Inter-Continental Peace Congress in Uruguay. In 1959, her television interview with journalist Mike Wallace was broadcast on national television. That same year, a Chicago station broadcast a debate between Hansberry and the film director Otto Preminger about his direction of the film Porgy and Bess. That year she was also interviewed by Chicago radio host Studs Terkel who inquired extensively about her political views as well as her hit play, A Raisin in the Sun. In 1961 she participated in a radio symposium on “The Negro in American Culture” with, among others, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. In 1963 she took part in a historic meeting between civil rights leaders and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. According to James Baldwin (1979), Hansberry ended the meeting after Kennedy denied her request for a moral commitment. Baldwin describes that “The meeting ended with Lorraine standing up. She said . . . ‘I am very worried about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the White cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.’”4 Born May 19, 1930, Hansberry’s middle-class family lived in Chicago’s South Side Black neighborhood where the minority middle-class and professional...