Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born in Chicago on the nineteenth of May, 1930, the youngest of four children of Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real-estate broker whose challenge to a restrictive covenant reached the United States Supreme Court. That case, Hansberry v. Lee (1940), was decided in the family's favor, and the memory of that struggle — of a Black family insisting on its right to a home — would one day burn at the center of her greatest work.

She studied at the University of Wisconsin before settling in New York City, where she took odd jobs, wrote for Paul Robeson's paper Freedom, and sharpened a voice that fused art with the fight for justice. In 1959, when she was twenty-eight, A Raisin in the Sun opened at Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre, making her the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway.

The play won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and Hansberry became the youngest playwright and the first Black dramatist to receive it. Its portrait of the Younger family — their dignity, their deferred dreams, their refusal to be diminished — spoke a truth that has outlived its moment and entered the American canon.

Her career was brief and blazing. She wrote The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window and left unfinished works gathered after her passing, including the anthology To Be Young, Gifted, and Black. On the twelfth of January, 1965, pancreatic cancer took her at only thirty-four. Young, gifted, and unbowed, Lorraine Hansberry gave her people a mirror and the world a masterpiece — and she is honored still.