10 Fascinating Facts About Lorraine Hansberry
By Norma Brickner | On May 22, 2020 | Updated May 2, 2025 | Comments (5)
Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1965) was an American playwright and author best known for A Raisin in the Sun, a 1959 play influenced by her background and upbringing in Chicago. The fascinating facts about Lorraine Hansberry following illustrate her development as a Black woman, activist, and writer.
Though A Raisin in the Sun is the crown jewel in Hansberry’s legacy, she was also known for the plays The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and Les Blancs.
To Be Young, Gifted and Black was a posthumously produced play and collection of writings that capped a brief and brilliant career. When she died of pancreatic cancer in 1965, she was only thirty-four years old.
She was first Black woman to have a play staged on Broadway
A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. When she was only 29 years old, Hansberry became the youngest American and the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play.
Hansberry commented on her play:
“It is a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes [in the parlance of the time], and life. The thing I tried to show was the many gradations in even one Negro family, the clash of the old and the new, but most of all the unbelievable courage of the Negro people.”
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Learn more about Lorraine Hansberry
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Her father was a plaintiff in a Supreme Court housing case
Lorraine Hansberry’s father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was involved in the Supreme Court case. It was previously ruled that African Americans were not allowed to purchase property in the Washington Park subdivision in Chicago, Illinois.
In 1938, after her father bought a house in the south side of Chicago, the family was subject to the wrath of their white neighbors, resulting in U.S. Supreme Court’s Hansberry v. Lee case.
This experience is reflected in Raisin in how unwelcoming the white community was to the Younger family in Clybourne Park. Hansberry’s father died in 1946 when she was only fifteen years old. She was later quoted as saying that “American racism helped kill him.”
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Lorraine came from an accomplished circle of family and friends
The Hansberry family had many friends and relatives that were involved in the arts. W.E.B. Du Bois, the Civil Rights activist, author, sociologist, and historian, and Paul Robeson, the musician and actor, were friends of the Hansberry family.
Hansberry’s uncle, William Leo Hansberry, founded the Howard University African Civilization section of the history department, her cousin Shauneille Perry is an actress and playwright, and her younger relatives, Taye Hansberry is an actress and Aldridge Hansberry is a composer and flutist.
Later, Hansberry would maintain her own close bonds with Du Bois, Robeson, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin. All mourned her premature death.
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The title, A Raisin in the Sun, came from a Langston Hughes poem
The title of Hansberry’s now-iconic play A Raisin In the Sun was inspired by Hughes’ poem “Harlem.” One could argue that the play illustrated the poem’s sentiment:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
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Quotes from A Raisin in the Sun
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Nina Simone dedicated a song to her
In 1969, four years after Lorraine Hansberry’s death, Nina Simone wrote a song titled “Young, Gifted, and Black” after being inspired by a talk that Hansberry delivered to college students. Since that time, other artists including Aretha Franklin have covered the song, which begins:
To be young, gifted and black
Oh, what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black
Open your heart to what I mean
In the whole world you know
There are a million boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black
And that’s a fact!
Hansberry and Simone had been friends and shared a bond over their interests in social justice and radical politics. also named Lorraine Hansberry the Godmother of her daughter, Lisa Simone.
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Hansberry was an advocate for gay rights
Hansberry was a contributor to The Ladder, a predominantly lesbian publication, where she wrote about homophobia and feminism. She even wrote anonymous letters to the publication alluding to her own lesbian relationships.
Princeton Professor Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine, wrote that “she was a feminist before the feminist movement. She identified as a lesbian and thought about LGBT organizing before there was a gay rights movement. She was an anti-colonialist before independence had been won in Africa and the Caribbean.”
Hansberry kept a low profile of her identity as a lesbian.
She addressed social issues in her writings
Not only did Hansberry address social and racial issues in her novels and plays, but she also wrote articles true to her voice and beliefs for a progressive Black journal, Freedom, concerning governmental issues. She explored the issues of colonialism and imperialism through her own lens as well as the female perspective.
Hansberry was invited to meet Robert F. Kennedy (then U.S. Attorney General) in May, 1963 due to the work she had done as a Civil Rights activist, but declined the invitation. She admonished the Kennedy administration to be more active in addressing the problem of segregation in the community.
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To Be Young, Gifted and Black
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James Baldwin was her close friend and confidant
Lorraine Hansberry was 28 when she met James Baldwin, 34 at the time. Lorraine believed that the artist’s voice in whatever medium was to be as an agent for social change. That was what formed their bond at the time when Lorraine was developing her own Black, feminist, and queer politics.
Both of these talented writers wanted to incorporate themes of race and sexual identity into their stage work, something that was considered quite radical at the time.
James Baldwin wrote the introduction to Hansberry’s biography, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black with an endearing letter to Hansberry titled “Sweet Lorraine.”
Ex-husband Robert Nemiroff became her literary executor
In 1952, Hansberry married Robert Nemiroff, a publisher, songwriter, poet, and political activist. They had courted briefly, having met earlier that year at a protest aimed at the discriminatory hiring practices at New York University. They were both in their early twenties; he a Jewish native New Yorker.
Possibly because of Lorraine’s sexual preferences, she wasn’t as sure about him as he was about her. Their union was unconventional, but they were devoted to one another. They divorced a year before she passed away in 1965, but Nemiroff remained in Hansberry’s working orbit and became her literary executor.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. honored Lorraine after her passing
As is well known, Lorraine Hansberry died young from cancer. Dr. King. issued this statement following her passing: “Her commitment of spirit … her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.”
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Contributed by Norma Brickner, a 2021 Journalism and Digital Media graduate of SUNY-New Paltz.
I’m an especial fan of Black womanist lit. Hansberry’s work astounds me at every encounter.
I am in Houston and may go see “Clybourne Park” at the Midtown A&T Center before I leave town next week
I saw it on Broadway, it’s an excellent play and homage to Lorraine Hansberry!
Thank you for this detailed and well-written article about an amazing young woman! Taken from us far too soon.
How true, Clifford … so sad that she left this world at age 34. And how amazing that she had already accomplished so much.