Remembering Lorraine Hansberry
January 12, 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of one of America’s great playwrights, Lorraine Hansberry. She is best known as the author of A Raisin In the Sun, which opened on Broadway on March 11, 1959, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. On the surface, the play tells the story of a family living on the South Side of Chicago that is faced with the difficult decision of how to spend $10,000 in life insurance. Underpinning the dilemma is a battle royale between materialism, idealism, and a family’s struggle to save the soul of its husband, brother, and son, Walter Lee. Added to the turmoil is the life-changing decision to move into a white neighborhood that will likely not accept them. The original cast, which included Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil, Ruby Dee, Diana Sands, and Louis Gossett, Jr., garnered glowing critical and popular reviews.
Hansberry “forced both blacks and whites to re-examine the deferred dreams of black America,” New York Times theater critic Frank Rich wrote on the 25th anniversary of the “seminal play which sparked the growth of the black theater movement in the 1960s.”
Growing up on the South Side of Chicago in a family that might have been considered rich during the Great Depression, Hansberry knew something about the challenges that came with integration. Her father, who worked in real estate, moved his family to an all-white neighborhood where they were often confronted and bullied by angry residents, causing Hansberry’s mother to patrol their property at night with a loaded pistol.
Passionate about the arts, including painting, sketching, and sculpting, Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She planned to study theatrical set design, but was discouraged by a professor who told her not to waste her time. So she moved to New York City, where she held various jobs as a tagger in the garment industry, a typist, a camp counselor, a recreation director, a writer, and then an associate editor at a newspaper called Freedom, founded by the actor and activist Paul Robeson. It was during this period that she began to work on A Raisin in the Sun.
The drama would go on to be voted the best play in 1959 by the New York Drama Critics Circle, beating out entries by, 
among others, Tennessee Williams (for his play Sweet Bird of Youth). Hansberry became the youngest person ever, at age 28, to be so honored.
Today A Raisin in the Sun can be found in every library. A 1961 movie starring Sidney Poitier and other original cast members was released in 1961, and in 2008, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs starred along with Audra McDonald, Phylicia Rashad, and Sanaa Lathan in a made-for-television movie.
Although Hansberry suffered from writer’s block, she did pen another play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, about Greenwich Village intellectuals. Unfortunately, five days after the play opened, Hansberry went into convulsions and slipped into a coma. Cancer of the pancreas had spread to her brain. On January 12, 1965, Lorraine Hansberry died. The theater where Sign had opened went dark in her memory, and the play did not reopen. Gone much too soon, she was 34.
As we remember Lorraine Hansberry and her tremendous talent as a writer, we recall something her close friend, James Baldwin said: “That marvelous laugh and that marvelous face, Sweet Lorraine.”
