Lorraine Hansberry, dramatist and author, died in New York City on this date January 12,1965. Her play, A Raisin in the Sun, was the first play written by a Black woman to be performed on Broadway.
Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago, the daughter of a prominent real-estate broker, Carl Hansberry, and the niece of William Leo Hansberry (1894-1965), a Howard University professor of African history in D.C. William Leo Hansberry taught at Howard University until 1959, after rejecting employment offers from Atlanta University and the Honorable Marcus Garvey. A college at the University of Nigeria was named in his honor. Hansberry’s parents were intellectuals and activists. Her father was an active member of the Republican Party. He won an antisegregation case before the Illinois Supreme Court, upon which the events in A Raisin in the Sun was loosely based. When Lorraine was eight, her parents bought a house in a white neighborhood, where they were welcomed one night by a racist mob. Their experience of discrimination there led to a civil rights case.
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A Raisin in the Sun. – The play is a “living-room” drama, set in the South Side slums of Chicago. Walter Lee, a black chauffeur, dreams of a better life. “I want so many things that they are driving me kind of crazy…” he says. He hopes to use his father’s life insurance money, $10,000 to open a liquor store. Beneatha, his sister, wants to go to medical school. Their mother, Lena Younger, rejects the liquor business. She wants to save money for Beneatha’s college education and uses some of it to secure a proper house for the family. Rest of the money she gives to Walter, entrusting him to deposit half of it in the bank for Beneatha’s education and his business. Walter sinks rest of the money into his business scheme, only to have it stolen by a con artist. Mr. Lindner, a representative of the all-white neighborhood, tries to buy them out. In despair, Walter contacts Lindner, and almost begs to buy them out. Mama tells him: “Have you cried for that boy today? I don’t mean for yourself and for the family ’cause we lost the money. I mean for him: what he been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning – because that ain’t the time at all.” Walter regains his pride and integrity and decides that the family will take the house after all. He refuses the payoff of the white citizens’, anticipating the uncompromising policies of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
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