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 developer whose 1940 Supreme Court victory in Hansberry v. Lee struck down racially restrictive covenants in Chicago — and Nannie Louise Perry. She attended the University of Wisconsin, dropped out after two years to work on Paul Robeson's Freedom newspaper in New York, and at twenty-eight wrote the play that became A Raisin in the Sun.

A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on the eleventh of March 1959. It was the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway, the first directed by a Black director (Lloyd Richards) on Broadway, and made Hansberry the youngest playwright — at twenty-eight — to receive the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play. The 1961 film adaptation, with Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee, brought the work to a national audience and established the play in the American theatrical canon, where it has been continuously staged for sixty-five years.

Her second produced play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964), closed early due to weak box-office on the night she died. A volume of her writings titled To Be Young, Gifted and Black — drawn from her journals and edited by her literary executor Robert Nemiroff — was assembled posthumously and became the title of Nina Simone's 1969 anthem.

She died of pancreatic cancer at University Hospital in New York on the twelfth of January 1965, age thirty-four.

She is honored here as the playwright who broke Broadway and gave a generation its phrase.