Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was a playwright, writer, essayist, and civil rights, activist. She was the first Afro-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway theatre, also known simply as Broadway.
Her best-known work is the play A Raisin in the Sun. It highlights the lives of Black Americans who live under a social system in Chicago that provides separate facilities for the minority group. She was a writer who would not feel ashamed of getting inspired by others’ work and using the idea in her work.
At the age of twenty-nine, she received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. With this award, she became the first Afro-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so.
Hansberry’s family had fought against segregation. They challenged a restrictive agreement and eventually provoked the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
When she moved to New York City, Hansberry started working at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom. There, she interacted with intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois.
Much of Hansberry’s work during this time discussed the African struggle for liberation and their consequent impact on the world. Hansberry’s writings also talked about her lesbianism and the oppression of homosexuality.
A Short Biography of Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930. She was the youngest of her three siblings. Her father’s name was Carl Augustus Hansberry who was a successful real estate agent. Her mother’s name was Nannie Louise who was a driving school teacher and ward committeewoman.
In 1938, her father bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago and became the subject to the anger of their white neighbors. When Carl died in 1946, Lorraine was fifteen years old. Later on, she once said that American racism helped kill her father.
The Hansberry’s were most often visited by prominent black people such as sociology professor W. E. B. DuBois, actor and political activist Paul Robeson, poet Langston Hughes, musician Duke Ellington and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens. It suggests that Hansberry was brought up in an environment where she was surrounded by such influential people.
Similarly, Carl Hansberry’s brother, William Leo Hansberry, established the African Civilization section in the History Department at Howard University. In this way, Lorraine was taught since childhood that two things must never be compromised: the family and the race.
Hansberry graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary in 1944 and from Englewood High School in 1948. She went to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. There, she quickly became politically involved with the Communist Party USA.
Despite the disapproval of her mother, she worked on the presidential campaign of Henry A. Wallace’s in 1948. She spent the summer of 1949 in Mexico and studied painting at the University of Guadalajara.
In 1950, Hansberry decided to pursue her career as a writer in New York City. There, she went to The New School. After this, she moved to Harlem in 1951band thus became an active member of the struggles such as the fight against those landlords who compelled tenants to leave the premises.
On June 20, 1953, Hansberry got married to Robert Nemiroff. He was a Jewish publisher, songwriter and political activist like Hansberry as well. After marriage, the couple shifted to Greenwich Village, which became the setting of Hansberry’s second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window.
When the song “Cindy, Oh Cindy” got successful, Hansberry got encouraged to start writing full-time. Although Hansberry and Nemiroff got separated in 1957 and eventually divorced in 1962, their professional relationship remained the same until the death of Hansberry. She died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, at the age of 34.
Hansberry as a Lesbian
Hansberry was a lesbian. Before her marriage, she had written in her notebooks that she felt attracted to women more than men. In 1957, she contacted a Francisco-based lesbian rights organization and contributing two letters to their magazine.
Some gay and lesbian writers have used these letters as evidence that Hansberry has been part of the homosexual movement and also participated as an activist for gay rights.
Other than these letters, no evidence supports the claim that Hansberry was involved in the movements regarding gay and lesbian rights.
Freedom Newspaper and Activism
In 1951, she joined the black journal, Freedom Newspaper. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. Du Bois and other Black Pan-Africanists. In the newspaper, she worked as a subscription clerk, receptionist, typist, and editorial assistant one after another. Other than this, she wrote news articles and editorials as well.
Just like many black civil rights activists, Hansberry also understood that the struggle against white superiority must be interlinked with the form of a social system that abolished private ownership.
In the same manner, Hansberry did not only work and participated in the US civil rights movement but she also struggled against global colonialism and imperialism. She was a great admirer and advocate of female participation in any global struggle. For this reason, she looks deep into the situation of Egypt where women fought one of the most significant fights for the equality of both sexes.
Lorraine Hansberry’s Achievement as a Playwright
Playwright Lorraine Hansberry brought in a revolution in the era of U.S. theatre history. She presented on the stage the realistic representation of the life of urban, working-class African Americans. Many critics have looked deep into her work and described them as masterpieces.
In Hansberry’s adapted autobiography To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Nina Simone writes that before the work of Hansberry, people have not seen so many black people in the theatre.
The reason for this is that before Hansberry, in the whole history of the American theatre, no one presented the truth of the lives of the black people on stage. However, Hansberry did more than just expand the content of the realistic stage drama to include African American life.
When her further writings became available in the 1980s, many literary critics agreed for even broader recognition of her stature. When she died, she left a wide, rich, and unique dramatic heritage. When she was alive, only a small part of her work was visible; therefore, some parts have yet to become known.
When all of her work will be brought into observation, she will be seen as one of the most important playwrights of this century. She will receive this honor not simply based on the one play already considered a classic, but on her whole collection of work.
Hansberry’s writings are a combination of a large variety of artistic trends and genres. She made her own clear and broad literary vision by gathering in her works the incisive beliefs and opinions of prevailing social conditions. She also incorporated the aspects of her life and experiences into her work.
Throughout her life, she has faced a struggle between her upper-middle-class wealthiness and her firm commitment to black liberation and freedom from all types of oppression.
Lorraine Hansberry and Afrocentricity
In the New York Times, critics remarked that Hansberry’s body of work shows elements of the African Americans’ protest movement of the forties. They also reflect on the elements of the universal, non-racial themes that were more noticeable than anything else during the fifties.
In the same way, they possess the elements of the black nationalist movement of the sixties. The critics wrote about her that nowadays, everybody is talking about the theory of Afrocentricity but Hansberry was writing about it before even the word was coined and became fashionable.
Lorraine Hansberry’s Fame as a Playwright
Written and completed in 1957, A Raisin in the Sun made Hansberry worldwide popular. After two years, the book was translated into more than thirty different languages.
Additionally, it was performed all over the world.
After her growing global fame, in April 1959, photographer David Attie did an extensive photo shoot of Hansberry for Vogue magazine, in the same apartment where she had written the play. Through those photographs, the world saw her intellectual confidence, her protective self, and immense beauty.
After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry wrote two screenplays of the same play. However, both of them were rejected by Columbia Pictures for being controversial. In 1960, Hansberry was asked to create a television program regarding slavery. As a result, she wrote The Drinking Gourd whose script was called superb but was rejected.
Another play of Hansberry that was given contemporary production was The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. It was another success because it has one hundred and one performances on Broadway and eventually closed the night she died.
Beliefs of Lorraine Hansberry
Hansberry believed that achieving civil rights in the United States and getting independence in colonial Africa are the two different sides of the same coin. Both of these aspects face similar challenges for Africans on both sides of the Atlantic.
She was an advocate of basic rights and freedom. She appreciated the independence of Ghana and said that independence is the promise of freedom for all the coloured people of the world.
Hansberry once said regarding tactics that blacks must understand and use every single means of struggle. They must use legal, illegal, passive, active, violent, and non-violent means of struggles.
They must learn that they have every right to harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps and even shoot from their windows when the racists come for pleasure and relaxation to the black communities.
On June 15, 1964, in a debate, Hansberry criticized those white liberals who couldn’t accept civil disobedience. She said that there is an immense need to tell the white liberal to stop being a liberal rather become an American radical.
Hansberry was never in favour of the theory of existentialism. She believed that it is too far apart in relevance to the reality of the world’s economic and geopolitical situation. For this reason, she has written a critical evaluation of Richard Wright’s The Outsider. She also styled her final play Les Blancs as a contrast to Jean Genet’s Les Nègres.
However, Hansberry praised Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. From some of the instances, it can be perceived that Hansberry was a feminist. In 1959, Hansberry declared that women who are oppressed show a fighting disposition.
Hansberry was a peace lover. She was shocked by the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The event took place while she was in high school. Later on, she expressed a desire for a future in which no one fights. We wanted to get rid of all the little and the big bombs in one shape or another.
She believed that everyone has the right to defend themselves by using force against those who oppress them. She has discussed all these aspects in A Raisin in the Sun and for this reason, some critics have considered that its Pan-Africanist themes are dangerous.
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues
The American Dream
The long-standing appeal of Hansberry’s work lies in her belief that the right to have a better life is not limited to a specific race that is considered a superior one. In Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry has highlighted that every person for any background has the basic right to get a livable life that has equal opportunities of progress.
The idea of a better life can be different for different people but her underlying motivation is universal.
In the play, the central character has the idea of materialism. He has this notion of the American dream. He starts from scratches and achieves great wealth through his hard work.
In this way, Hansberry interprets that the American dream prioritizes justice and equality over money.
Female Gender Identity
Hansberry once said that she was born black and female. She treated these two traits as her two identities that dominated her life and writings as well. She rejected the restrictions placed on her race and gender. She discussed in her plays what it meant to be a black woman in post-war America.
Her writings show that throughout history, black women have suffered different known and unknown forms of marginalization, discrimination, and oppression. They were treated the same way in literature. Because literary writing and production have a white monopoly, black women were either not or misrepresented in the dominant white literary domain.
Hansberry believed that women need to have a clear and loud voice of their own. She was an active member of a literary movement, Womanism that tries to give black women their voice through the representation of their history and everyday experiences. The movement also highlights the triple effect of race, sex, and class on black women.
In A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry has discussed several womanist issues. They include black man-black woman associations, gender positions, the general image of the black woman in the 1950s American society, black matriarchy, and the issue of abortion.
She has used three black women in her play to portray the difficult matters that black women face in white racist society around them.
Masculinity
One of the themes that constantly appear in Hansberry’s works is what defines a man. The majority of her protagonist is male. She believed that a man has a certain innate identity that the society wants him to maintain as long as he is alive.
The protagonist in A Raisin in the Sun is a person who relates to his identity as a man. He wants to fulfil what society expects from him as a father, husband, and son.
Hansberry’s male characters want to perceive themselves as honourable in others’ eyes. They have little money but they still do more for their family. They invest in different things to provide better for their family.
Afrocentrism
There is a strong theme of Afrocentrism throughout the plays of Hansberry such as A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry grew up in a family that was well aware of its African heritage. For this reason, she accepted and embraced its roots completely.
Her sense of Afrocentrism is expressed mainly through her female character’s love for a Nigerian native. The female character is as eager to learn about African culture, language, music, and dress as Hansberry herself is. She has shown many of the myths about Africa.
She has concretely depicted the struggles that both Africans and African Americans face.
Other Themes
Some of the major themes in Hansberry’s work are the slave system and its impact on American society; the deprivation and injustice that blacks suffer because of racism; moral preferences; self-determination of African countries; ability to control one’s destiny; and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s whose causes were the black protest and revolt of slaves, such as Hannibal in The Drinking Gourd.
Lorraine Hansberry’s Writing Style and Artistic Conventions
Hansberry followed the style of realism. In her dramas, she wished to clarify an idea through the illustration of a character such as Walter who depicts masculinity. As an artist, she believed that all people have a certain role in society; therefore, there were no dramatically uninteresting people.
She searched for the uniqueness in the seemingly ordinary. She understood the social nature of art and this is how she unfolded the personality of her characters as they interacted with society.
Her dramatic style includes the use of colloquial speech.
She is blessed with a sense of the rhythm of language. She also used symbols to represent certain hidden ideas and in this way, she gives the material of thought to her readers.
In addition to writing very pragmatic dialogues, Hansberry’s writing technique gives a touch of the physical environment to her readers. The entire action of the play unfolds in front of them. She writes in such a way that the readers get an insight into the psychological makeup of her characters.
The readers come to know about the psychological formation of all major and minor characters. In this way, readers enjoy her work because they understand the inner voice of every character such as Ruth in A Raisin in the Sun. In addition, when Hansberry describes the physical setting of the play, she does it with the sense as if the room has a psyche of its own.
Original Audience
Hansberry wrote for the general audience of theatre. The particular audience for whom The Drinking Gourd was written was the general television audience of 1960. Her works aim to spread awareness regarding black slavery. As she was black, the audience could relate to her point of view about Afrocentrism and femininity, etc.
Awards
New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play