Lorraine Hansberry ( May 19, 1930- January 13, 1965) earned a special place in history as the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. As the daughter of Charles Hansberry, AKA the “kitchenette king”, Hansberry grew up on Chicago’s South Side in an affluent family. Despite her family’s wealth, she experienced racism. Hansberry’s father bought a house in a racially mixed neighborhood when she was eight years old, which prompted vicious attacks from their white neighbors. These attacks had a lasting impact on Hansberry, and she would later capture the essence of her family’s experience in her very successful play, A Raisin in the Sun. Theatergoers enjoyed the universal appeal of Hansberry’s plays, though she also seamlessly forged a connection between her art and hot-button issues which personally affected her—like racial equity, women’s rights, and the gay rights movement—that may have otherwise alienated mainstream audiences. Her skillful approach to making controversial topics accessible to the general public wasn’t limited to the stage. As she rose to fame, she became a regular guest at televised debates and town halls, sharing her ideas with the influencers of the 1960s. She notably participated in a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, who served as Attorney General at the time, along with James Baldwin and other Black cultural leaders to discuss race relations in the United States. Widely recognized as a brilliant writer and thinker, Hansberry’s promising career was cut short by a quick and brutal battle with pancreatic cancer at 34. She died on the closing night of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, the second of her plays to be performed in her lifetime. Her body of work may be sparse, but her words continue to inspire readers generations after her death.
Notable works: A Raisin in the Sun, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, Les Blancs (published posthumously)
