Her Writing

Lorraine Hansberry is best known for her critically acclaimed play, A Raisin in the Sun, which was first performed on Broadway in 1959. Hansberry also wrote the play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, as well as several unfinished plays, including Les Blancs, The Drinking Gourd, and What Use Are Flowers. Before completing A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was an associate editor for Paul Robeson's Freedom newspaper. She continued her activist writing through her essays, letters to publications, public appearances, and interviews. Many excerpts from these various works can be found in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969). This collection of Hansberry's creative and social activist writing, much of it unfinished, was published after Hansberry's death by her former husband, Robert Nemiroff.

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED, AND BLACK (1969)

The assortment of letters, play excerpts, photographs, and musings that make up To Be Young, Gifted, and Black were compiled by Lorraine Hansberry’s former husband, Robert Nemiroff.

Lorraine Hansberry was a prolific writer, often focusing her talents on editorial response letters to publications like the New York Times. In 1964, she wrote a letter to the editor of the Times in response to civil disobedience and a CORE sit-in. In a letter to a student fan, she responded to a question about how she viewed Dr. Martin Luther King’s nonviolence techniques. Hansberry explains that she sees nonviolence as necessary protection to prevent “mass murder of our people” (213). She does not place the practice of nonviolence on any idealistic pedestal; she argues that it is a viable option for African Americans in America and advocates multiple methods of protest:

“I think, then, that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps—and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities…The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children [sic]” (214).

Hansberry ends her letter to the young student with a request for his thoughts on the matter. She was more interested in active discussion than her own soapbox routine.

In an essay response to Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” Hansberry critiqued the view of African-Americans as "different" and therefore less human. She wrote:

“White America has to believe “The Blacks” are different – and not only so, but that, by the mystique of this difference, they actually profit in certain charming ways” (199).

She addressed the issue of how whites see blacks in America during a forum discussion on The Black Revolution and the White Backlash. She criticized white liberals who claimed to be on the side of black people, but still urged them to somehow temper their unrest and be more patient when it came to changing law and practices.

Hansberry also spoke out against any separation of classes among Blacks that would elevate certain members while the majority still lived in poverty and despair. In an address to a conference which featured Jerome Smith, field organizer of CORE, Hansberry mentioned that she did not care to be invited to see the President as an “exceptional negro.” She saw the need for all African-Americans to fight together and remain undivided by class or education lines. It makes sense that A Raisin in the Sun is a play about the working class and not the middle class, which Hansberry herself had experienced.

A RAISIN IN THE SUN(1959)

Miss Hansberry's play is a social protest, but it is such a consummate work of art that the objects of the protest applaud it vigorously each night in Broadway. - John A. Davis (January 1960)

(from Ben Keppel's Work of Democracy)

Lorraine Hansberry is best known for A Raisin in the Sun, which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1959. Hansberry's non-fiction work clearly reveals her to be an activist intellectual. However, her fiction is not far behind. The very act of her writing a play as a young, black woman in the late fifties was monumental. Also, the play dealt with important contemporary themes relative to the Civil Rights movement at the time.

In The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race, Ben Keppel notes that A Raisin in the Sun has often been misinterpreted as an "ethnic drama" with a happy ending to all problems, including racism.

Hansberry was grieved to learn that although her play was a success, many of the social points were lost on some people. She reacted to those who exoticized the character Walter Lee:

"Some writers have been astonishingly incapable of discussing his purely class aspirations and have persistently confounded them with they further consider to be (and what Walter never can) 'the white man's world.' We have grown accustomed to the dynamics of the 'Negro' personality as expressed by white authors. Thus, de Emperor, de Lawd, and of course Porgy, still haunt our frame of reference when a new character emerges...America...fell in love with the image of the simple, lovable, and glandular Negro'."

Hansberry attempted to prevent further misreadings by including additional material to later versions of the play and screen adaptation.

Scene from A Raisin in the Sun

For more on A Raisin in the Sun, click here.

THE MOVEMENT(1964)

The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality is a collection of impactful photographs of the Civil Rights Movement,as well as particularly poignant or interesting scenes from everyday life. The Movement was published by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commitee (SNCC).

Lorraine Hansberry contributed concise but stirring commentary to accompany the photographs. She wrote about sit-ins, jailed protestors, and the effects of racial violence. Hansberry emphasized the historical background of injustice -- that the situation at the time is not new, but that people are agitating more and more. She also noted that racism is just one way in which people suffer and that poverty among both blacks and whites is a significant problem.

Selected Quotes from The Movement :

"The laws which enforce segregation do not presume the inferiority of a people; they assume an inherent equalness. It is the logic of the lawmakers that if a society does not erect artificial barriers between the pople at every point of contact, the people might fraternize and give their attention to the genuine, shared problems of the community."

(next to a picture of a young Black girl)

"TODAY'S OBJECTIVE: before she is an adult, FREEDOM."

(next page)

"NOW!"

"People do not always need poets and playwrights to state their case. This woman has just said: I worked for three dollars a day. I want freedom. All my life I want freedom. We all cry for freedom!"

FREEDOM NEWSPAPER (1951-55)

Paul Robeson

Hansberry spent four years on the Freedom newspaper staff, first starting as an apprentice and then rising to associate editor. Many believe that this is where Hansberry truly developed her identity as a social activist. She worked with Robeson, but also with W.E.B. Du Bois, Louis Burnham, John O. Killens, and Julian Mayfield.

While on staff, she wrote "What Are You Doing Out There?" in which she argued that certain African American leaders "have soberly decided that the path to Negro liberation lies with the Communists rather the Democrats, Republicans, or Dixiecrats."

She also wrote on Brown v. Board of Education, Egyptian nationalism, and decolonization of Africa. In an essay about Brown v. Board, she noted how African-American youth are taught to devalue themselves:

"In a land where the Grace Kelly-Marilyn Monroe monotyped 'ideal' is imposed on a national culture, racist logic insists that anything directly opposite - no matter how lovely- is naturally ugly."

The quotes in the above section of Her Writing were taken from Keppel's The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race

For more of Hansberry's activist writings, click here.