Apropos of Black History Month, Mayor Richard M. Daley announced that A Raisin in the Sun is the current selection for the One Book, One Chicago reading program. For the second time, libraries, schools and discussion groups in the city will all be reading a work by a woman-loving author. Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning play joins the earlier selection, My Antonia by lesbian novelist Willa Cather.
Hansberry was born in Chicago in 1930 to an upper middle-class family and lived, until she was eight years old, at 5330 S. Calumet. As a young woman, Lorraine went to Englewood High School, where she first became interested in theatre, and briefly studied painting at the Art Institute.
In 1939, her mother, Nannie Perry, and father Carl, a realtor, experienced one of the crucial elements of her play when they deliberately moved into the then racially restricted Washington Park-Kenwood neighborhood challenging Chicago's de facto segregated housing covenants of the era. Carl Hansberry would fight his case through the Illinois courts to victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1941, effectively breaking the legal barrier to open housing.
In 1950 Ms. Hansberry moved to New York City, became an editor for Paul Robeson's Freedom magazine, and married Robert Nemiroff. She wrote Raisin in 1956; it had a pre-Broadway run here at the Blackstone Theatre in February, 1959, with a cast that included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Louis Gosset and Ivan Dixon. Raisin became the first play by an African-American woman to be produced on Broadway and garnered the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play of the Year. Ms. Hansberry was the youngest American and first African-American playwright to win the award. She wrote the screenplay for the 1961 film version; however, Hollywood cut several of her scenes depicting the racism experienced by her characters. In 1995, Viking-Penguin issued A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay with commentary by director Spike Lee and others.
In 1976, in her keynote address at the 2nd Annual Lesbian Writers Conference here in Hyde Park, Barbara Grier of the lesbian publishing house, Naiad Press, identified Ms. Hansberry as a member of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national lesbian organization. She referenced two letters from Ms. Hansberry published in the DOB magazine, The Ladder. In 1978 at 'An Afternoon for Women's Rights' panel sponsored by the International Women's Day Coalition, I shared the podium with labor leader Addie Wyatt, the Rev. Willie Barrow of Operation PUSH, and others. I took the opportunity to quote from one of Ms. Hansberry's 1957 letters: 'What ought to be clear is that one is oppressed or discriminated against because one is different, not 'wrong' or 'bad' somehow.'
Diana Marre in Notable Black American Women (1992) writes that Hansberry '... linked the struggle for gay rights, rights of people of color, and rights for women long before such terms as homophobia and feminism came into the vernacular.' In Out of the Past: Gay/Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present (1995) Neil Miller writes: 'Her husband, Robert Nemiroff, noted that Hansberry's homosexuality 'was not a peripheral or casual part of her life, but contributed significantly on many levels to the sensitivity and complexity of her view of human beings and of the world.''
Ms. Hansberry separated from Nemiroff in 1957 and they divorced in 1964. She died at age 34 the next year. A second play, Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, was staged during her lifetime. Three others, Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and her anti-war What Use Are Flowers? were published posthumously. A montage of Ms. Hansberry's writings collected from her plays, poems and journals adapted by Nemiroff, was published as To Be Young Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words with an introduction by gay author James Baldwin.
In 1963 at the height of the civil-rights struggle, Mr. Baldwin was invited by then Attorney General Robert Kennedy to a meeting to discuss race relations. Mr. Baldwin brought with him Ms. Hansberry and several other prominent African Americans including Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and activist leaders who tried to communicate their fears that unless things changed in America, non-violence would fail and 'the fire next time' would be deadly.
The group was frustrated by Kennedy's apparent lack of understanding of the situation of American Blacks. In Randall Kenan's biography (1994) of James Baldwin, Ms. Hansberry is reported to have said: '... you and your brother (President John F. Kennedy) are representatives of the best that a white America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there's no alternative except our going to the streets...'. Jeanne L. Noble in Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters writes Ms. Hansberry's legacy, which persists though she died '... just before the fiercest testing period of the black revolution, is itself monumental. And we will always ponder these among her last words: 'I think when I get my health back I shall go into the South to find out what kind of revolutionary I am.''
In 1999, Lorraine Hansberry was inducted into the City of Chicago's Gay & Lesbian Hall of Fame. In 2000, Raisin was staged at the Goodman Theatre and four other Hansberry works were performed at venues around the city, prompting a comment worth repeating as readers all over the city discover her anew: Hansberry is blossoming again in Chicago.
Copyright 2003 by Marie J. Kuda.
E-mail kudoschgo@aol.com
