Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), American writer and activist for equal rights for African Americans, best known for her play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which was made into a motion picture in 1961. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born in Chicago, Illinois, and because her parents were prominent in national black cultural and political circles, she met many influential African Americans during her childhood. In 1938 Hansberry's family challenged Chicago's segregation laws by moving to an all-white neighborhood. Hansberry attended the University of Wisconsin but left in 1950 and moved to New York City. She was a reporter and editor for Freedom, a progressive black newspaper in New York, from 1950 to 1953.

A Raisin in the Sun tells the story of a black Chicago family's attempt to find sense in their constrained existence. The play was the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, and it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1959. Hansberry's second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964), concerns a white intellectual in Greenwich Village, New York City. After Hansberry's death from cancer, her husband, songwriter and music publisher Robert Nemiroff, adapted her letters, plays, and papers into the production To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969). This compilation was published in book form that same year. During her career Hansberry also wrote many articles and essays on racism, homophobia, world peace, and other social issues.