CHAPTER ONE

Migration Song

Why was it important to take a small step, a teeny step, or the most desired of all—one GIANT step? A giant step to where?

—Lorraine Hansberry¹

THE WEATHER WAS COOL, blue sky and bluster. Lorraine was born in May. Her mother, Nannie Perry Hansberry, gave birth in Provident, the first Black owned and operated hospital in the nation. It was a fitting location. Carl and Nannie, like thousands of others, had departed from the Deep South decades prior and built their lives in the Windy City. Chicago was a destination of Black hope and aspiration. The Hansberrys were strivers. And Lorraine was the last of their four children. She came into something special.

Their life, like that of most Black Chicagoans, was on the South Side. But Carl and Nannie were distinguished in their community: They were college educated. Carl had graduated from Alcorn State in his native Mississippi and Nannie, from Tennessee State University in her home state. Nannie was a teacher and a ward leader for the Republican Party. Carl was a successful real estate entrepreneur, a man known as the “kitchenette king” in the Chicago Defender. He earned this designation by routinely purchasing three-unit apartment buildings and chopping the units into ten smaller sections, each of them with a partial kitchen attached to the living room. The kitchenettes allowed Carl, and the other investors who followed suit, to provide housing for Black residents who, due to widespread housing discrimination, were squished into far too small a terrain. Quite simply: the South Side was bursting at the seams, and Carl found a lucrative solution to the problem. As a result, the Hansberrys were, at least in the eyes of the community in which they lived, wildly successful.

And yet, like the vast majority of their skinfolk, they were shuttered into the ghetto. The Great Depression had cast an already poor community into desperation. The waves of migrants from the South slowed, and the people relied on each other even more intensely. Lorraine would remember her early years in this way:

The honesty of their living is there in the shabbiness: scrubbed porches that sag and look their danger. Dirty gray wood steps. And always a line of white and pink clothes scrubbed so well, waving in the dirty wind of the city. [. . .] Our south side is a place apart . . . each piece of our living is a protest.²

Living on South Parkway and Forty-Fifth, the Hansberry family was knitted within a fabric of migrants. They occupied the same building as their tenants. Many of the adults worked in the stockyards of the smoky industrial city that was at once a center of global exchange and a site of intense segregation. Chicago was known for business, from gangsters to gilded captains of industry, and the hard-scrabble lives of its laboring residents. The Black migrants from Southern farms traded terror and cotton fields for crowded units with hallway toilets and a slightly greater taste of freedom.

Lorraine, though a bookish and interior child, was part of the throng of children playing on those wooden back porches of Chicago apartment buildings and on the burning concrete of Chicago blocks. Her recollections of childhood were often sweetest when she remembered summertime:

My childhood South Side summers were the ordinary city kind, full of the street games and rhymes that anticipated what some people insist on calling modern poetry. . . . I remember skinny little South Side bodies by the fives and tens of us, panting the delicious hours away.

A favorite game was the childhood classic Mother, May I, the choreography of which Lorraine described tenderly:

One drew in all one’s breath and tightened one’s fist and pulled the small body against the heavens, stretching, straining all the muscles in the legs, to make—one. . . . giant . . . step . . . Why was it important to take a small step, a teeny step, or—one giant step? A giant step to where?³

Some steps Lorraine was expected to take as a child of the Black middle class, in particular, isolated her. They discomfited her, and even made her suffer. In one of the most poignant recollections of her youth she recalled the terrible error her parents made in sending her to school in a lavish white fur coat in the middle of the Great Depression. Wearing it, Lorraine thought she looked exactly like someone wearing one of those dreadful rabbit suits meant to entertain children. She detested those big human rabbits. Her parents thought it was lovely. Lorraine explained their delight, in part, by saying that she was the only child who did not come from the “Rooseveltian atmosphere of the homes of the thirties.” Her parents had not yet defected like other Black folks from the traditional Black Republican Party affiliation that reached back to Reconstruction. President Franklin Roosevelt’s social safety net was not entirely in line with the Hansberrys’ politics. Carl was a capitalist. When Lorraine showed up at school in that fur coat, her classmates gave her a good walloping. She understood why. She too reviled the fancy coat and soon all symbols of affluence. Her providential birth became a source of shame. Though a little girl, she knew, as someone intimately connected with her people, people who had so little in comparison to her family, that her classmates had good reason to resent that coat when food was often scarce and both work and housing were hard to come by.

The gap between Lorraine and her parents was pronounced in other ways. From her perspective, Carl and Nannie approached parenting in a utilitarian fashion. All four children were well fed, clothed, and provided for. But there was no coddling. When sick, the children were nursed back to health with appropriate remedies and attention, but not much affection. The Hansberry children were expected to be good and were matter-of-factly taught clear values:

We were also taught certain vague absolutes: that we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone; that we were the products of the proudest and most mistreated of the races of man; that there was nothing enormously difficult about life; that one succeeded as a matter of course.⁴

Carl and Nannie’s parenting style might have had something to do with class or generation, or merely disposition. Even though her parents were good parents, for Lorraine the emotional distance hurt. She yearned for affection. That, along with her being the youngest and a bother to her older siblings—Mamie was seven years her senior and Perry and Carl Jr., nine and ten years older respectively—contributed to an early sense of loneliness.

Though Lorraine rebelled from her parents’ politics and, as far as she was concerned, the coat incident was one of those early signposts of such rebellion, and she resented their emotional distance, the lessons about race and racial loyalty that she learned from them took root. Most of all: one must never betray the race. Notwithstanding their status, Carl and Nannie’s striving was not primarily self-aggrandizing. They were “race people” in the old-fashioned sense of the word: respectable representatives who believed that every success and every failure was either championing the race or shaming it. Carl’s entrepreneurialism was consistently connected to fighting against Jim Crow practices. His greatest fight began in 1937, the year Lorraine turned seven years old. Carl set his sights on a brick building for purchase at 6140 South Rhodes Avenue. This one was different from his previous purchases. The home was covered by a racially restrictive covenant, a private land agreement in which neighbors in the area had agreed to not sell to African Americans and other “undesirables.” Such agreements covered the majority of Chicago real estate at the time. But a personal dispute between one homeowner who served on the board of the Woodlawn Property Owners Association and the rest of the board led him to sabotage the neighborhood by selling his home to a Black purchaser, Carl Hansberry. Carl was well aware that his purchase would lead to a legal battle. He enlisted the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in advance and received a mortgage from the Supreme Life and Liberty Insurance Company, a Black-owned outfit that was often involved in Black politics in the city.

The case that resulted from Carl’s bold move sits somewhat dully in constitutional law textbooks today. But behind it was a harrowing story for the seven-year-old Lorraine. As an adult, she described the event in an unpublished letter to the New York Times. Carl, she said, spent a great deal of money and time working on the case with the NAACP. She, her mother, and siblings occupied the home and lived under siege. Outside their door a howling white mob lay in wait. She and her siblings were hit, spat upon, and cursed out as they walked to school. In the evenings, her mother protected the home with a German Luger pistol while Carl was often out of town working with the team of lawyers, fighting for their right to be there.

In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Lorraine’s sister, Mamie, recalled that a chunk of cement was thrown through the window by a member of the mob. The cement almost caught Lorraine’s head. It was thrown with such force that after it shattered the glass, and nearly hit the seven-year-old girl, it landed at the living room wall and lodged itself tightly into the plaster. “That was a grotesque sight to see that lodged in the wall,” Mamie told the Tribune. “You know that somebody doesn’t like you, doesn’t want you there.”⁵

Any reader familiar with Lorraine’s most famous play, A Raisin in the Sun, will sense that this episode, and Lorraine’s near-death experience in the midst of it, is an undercurrent of Raisin‘s story of a Black family that buys a home in a white neighborhood in Chicago. But in truth, the Hansberry experience was not unique. There were literally hundreds of cases across the Midwest of white mob violence in response to individual efforts to integrate. The consequences were destroyed property, lost homes, trauma, and sometimes death. Unlike the South, in which the racial hierarchy was marked in a plethora of other ways, from segregated train cars to lynching, in Northern cities real estate was the border of racial status.

Before writing A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine reflected on her own childhood experience multiple times in fictional form. Lorraine habitually worked through her ideas, memories, politics, and passions by writing vividly imagined fictional scenes. They are a key to revealing her interior life.

Unlike in Raisin, the violence in these creative vignettes was always immediate. In one, the protagonist is a migrant from Macon, Georgia, a working-class man who has tired of fighting rats in the ghetto and simply wants to give his wife a little house. “What the hell is a Negro suppose to do? [. . .] I have fought rats til I’m all but crazy and I said by the time my baby came I was going to have some kind of little house for her and I am.”⁶ His peers, however, are worried about him leaving his pregnant wife, Clarise, at home to face the white mobs while he’s at work. Clarise, he says, sits at home with a German Luger on her lap, like Nannie Hansberry did. When one of his coworkers suggests getting police protection, he scoffs, “Police don’t mean nothing. They white ain’t they?”⁷

The failure of police to protect Black residents in the face of white mobs was to be expected. What Lorraine meditated upon, with some frustration, was gender. In her not too thinly veiled critique of her father, and in the words of her fictional protagonists’ peers, she was troubled by the burden upon her mother, or any Black woman for that matter, who had to face bloodthirsty violence. Her disposition reflected her era, in which the masculine ideal was one of protector and provider, but it also reflected her sensitivity to the general reality that Black women were not afforded protections from the meanness of the world but rather called to face them up close.

In another experimental vignette, which Lorraine wrote in 1950, a white mob attacks a group of Black people getting into a car in front of their home. In this one, the Black people fight back. A person in the mob smashes their window; they retaliate by calling her a “whitebitch.” Twenty people surround the car, the Black driver attempts to drive into the crowd. The fantasy of retaliation and what satisfaction it might afford is disrupted again by a police officer who attacks.

The girl is dragged from the car. An officer, whom the girl calls with bitter sarcasm “a good uncolored,” stands above her and spits, “Get up, nigger.” She spits back, “Who, your mother?” He pulls her up and kicks her face, breaking her nose and knocking out a tooth. The girl says, “I wondered if the good uncolored was smiling. If he had gaps.”⁸

Lorraine’s impressionistic renderings of the violence of the “good uncolored,” an ironic turn of phrase if ever there was one, tells the reader that the “coloreds” were the human ones, the normal and decent ones. But the “uncolored” were a haunting other, devoid of morality or decency. And that is, of course, how they must have seemed to a young Lorraine.

She repeated the trauma in fiction, sometimes impressionistically and sometimes realistically. In the most intimate of the vignettes in which she conjured up her childhood terror, Lorraine herself appears in the first person as the little girl named Sarah who is almost hit by a brick. She is surrounded by her mother, her aunt, and a family friend named Mr. Rector, who is a World War II veteran. The kind, gentle, and disabled man feels a murderous rage. It is directed toward his racist fellow citizens, for whom he once killed in France. Then the rage turns to anguish: “Mr. Rector was calmer, the steel was gone from his eyes and there was water in them. I was seven . . . and men did not cry . . . but somehow there was water in Mr. Rectors [sic] eyes. . . . Bitter little Mr. Rector. He sat there and wept his soldier’s tears. No one tried to comfort him.”⁹

When the police arrive, the sense of pained impotence felt by Mr. Rector is paired with their willful disregard. They examine the home and take notes. Though they touch the window with the gaping hole, they repeat that there is nothing to worry about because “no one was hurt.” It reads as though Lorraine was writing from memory.

When Sarah’s mother asks the police to stay until her husband arrives, the cop, a large man, responds,

Look lady I don’t care about your husband, I’ve got to take the brick to headquarters. [. . .] I don’t give a damn about none of this. I’m here because I was sent. [. . .] I don’t know what you folks are all excited about anyhow. [. . .] Some people throw a rock in your window and you act like it was a bomb. [. . .] Jesus, these people wouldn’t have bothered you noways, if you was in your own neighborhood.¹⁰

Her maternal rage belies a steely insistence. She tells the officer that despite the fact that her baby was almost murdered by the racist mob, “we are not moving.” Lorraine wrote two different endings to this story. In both, the father comes home. In one, the girl falls asleep listening to the Southern accent of her father; in the other it is her mother’s voice, “The soft slurring made crisp in places by association with those who spoke in sharper accents. I went to sleep with his voice in my ears.”¹¹

The South was never far from Lorraine’s consciousness. People were always coming from “down home” and telling stories about down home, and she even traveled to her mother’s birthplace in Tennessee around the time of the brick incident. Along the ride Nannie directed her children, from the car, to look at the hills of Kentucky. She told them that her father, their grandfather, had escaped to them when he was a boy. A runaway slave as a child, he was protected by his own mother. She kept him alive by wandering into the forested hills in the middle of the night, leaving food and other provisions. Lorraine found the hills beautiful.

As a motif in her life, the South was a reminder of the struggle her parents had undertaken and how much labor remained. It was also her “root” and the source of her people’s routes, as it were. Once they arrived in Tennessee, Lorraine intuited that her grandmother’s tender and aged posture bespoke something that slavery, Jim Crow, and all the ills the migrants fled, had never been able to arrest or beat out of them. She was old, wrinkled, and resilient. She made teacakes and rocked in her rocker and talked about the past, about slavery, constantly. Lorraine’s grandmother died soon after their visit.

Migrants are rarely spoken of in the same manner as immigrants, but they share a great deal, particularly when it comes to the obligations of the second generation to make sense of how they came to be there, among those who spoke in sharper accents, becoming one with a sharp accent.

Lorraine described her fictional character Sarah dreaming about playing with the brick, turning the near-death object into a toy. A feature of trauma is repetition. Lorraine made the event into art. It is perhaps an understatement to say that this childhood event traumatized her. Of course it would. But in particular it shaped her ideas about gender and race. As her father was embarking on his respectable and righteous crusade, she, a girl of seven, was beginning to understand the world. In the North, like the South, they were at once fugitives from injustice and resilient and insistent Americans.

As white mobs illegally threatened the Hansberry family, the Woodlawn Property Owners Association went the legal route with their racism and filed a claim in circuit court to force the Hansberry family to leave the property. The Hansberrys were soon evicted from the property they owned at 6140 Rhodes Avenue. But Carl would not be defeated. With the legal support of Truman Gibson Jr., he spent three years in the courts arguing for his property rights. Their case reached the United States Supreme Court, and Hansberry v. Lee was decided on November 12, 1940, when Lorraine was approaching ten and a half years old. The resolution was bittersweet. The Hansberry family prevailed. They could take possession of the property. Several more blocks of the city were opened up to Black residents. But the court reached this decision only because the racially restrictive covenant had been improperly executed as a contract. It hadn’t had enough signatories to be binding. The Supreme Court refused to take up the issue as to whether racially restrictive covenants violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It would be eight more years before the court would tackle that question.

In reflection years later, Lorraine would describe her father as a “real American type American” who believed in struggling for equality “the respectable way.”¹² And yet it was clear to her, as a child, that such efforts were rarely rewarded in kind. Her encounters with the forces of Jim Crow were hardly ones in which white Americans demonstrated themselves to be respectful or “respectable” when it came to their Black fellow citizens. Their public life as a family—and they had a more public life than the vast majority of American families of any race—was demanding, taxing, and even in victory shaped by the rules of a Jim Crow society.

But when Lorraine was immersed in life “behind the veil” (to borrow a term from her future mentor W. E. B. Du Bois), a great deal of society’s ugliness receded from view and the world of Black Chicago was an extraordinary place. In the 1930s, Chicago was in the midst of a Black Renaissance. It was the center of the blues and gospel music industries. The greatest acts and choirs resided in or came through Chicago, and the records were pressed and distributed in the city. The Chicago Black press was robust. Newspapers and periodicals, including the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Sunday Bee, Negro Digest, and Negro Story Magazine, were all published in the city. These periodicals provided local, national, and international news of the Black world and also a venue for a crop of young writers to publish their work. Groups of writers working in collectives also flourished. These groups had emerged in Chicago in two primary ways: the Communist Party had established them as part of their cultural policy efforts, and the Works Progress Administration had too. Perhaps the most important project in the 1930s for Black Chicagoans was the Negro in Illinois project of the WPA, which enlisted dozens of workers to study the world of Black Chicago under the directorship of Black sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake. Among the writers who worked on the Negro in Illinois project were future literary luminaries Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker.

As Lorraine turned ten, life behind the veil took on a stunning public face when the American Negro Exposition opened. The exposition was held July 4–September 2, 1940. Truman Gibson Sr., one of Carl’s business partners, served as its executive director. It celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of the conclusion of the Civil War and was billed as a sort of Negro World’s Fair. Funded by a $75,000 matching grant from the WPA, it was an enormous collaborative effort. The exposition was held at the Eighteenth Street armory on the near South Side. Visitors to the exhibition entered a virtual city of Black American accomplishment. The center hall was dominated by a replica of Lincoln’s tomb. The exposition included a temple of religion with material from ten denominations, and films were screened in North Hall. There was a live theater, displays for the Associated Negro Press, a federal government display, dioramas with images of historic Black figures, a social science booth featuring the renowned Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and the Tanner Gallery, which was a juried art show featuring the largest display of African American art that had ever been presented.

A small child in a vast city of the race, Lorraine witnessed her world. She also saw the thousands of Black visitors who were eager to see themselves reflected. WPA and communist artists and intellectuals in whose tradition she would follow were part of the exhibition. They included Margaret Taylor Goss, Charles White, Horace Cayton, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Melvin Tolson, whose poem “Dark Symphony” was chosen to represent the exhibition. Tolson’s high modernist, seven-part evocation of Black history and creative resilience concludes with an elegant and enthusiastic embrace of Americanism, civil rights, and socialism:

Out of the dead-ends of Poverty,

Through wildernesses of Superstition,

Across barricades of Jim Crowism . . .

We advance!

We the Peoples of the World . . .

We advance!¹³

Walking through the exhibition, perhaps Lorraine felt the Rooseveltian atmosphere she described as suffusing the homes of her classmates and the cosmopolitan milieu of her own home. She already knew many of the figures celebrated as heroes of Black America. Her uncle Leo brought fellow intellectuals to her house. Her parents were friends and associates of many activists and leaders. She witnessed the interior workings of Black aspiration for the masses and for the leadership class, and in the exhibition she saw the ways those aspirations could be made to explode into the world. She must have imagined her own future in that throng.

Though she described herself as bookish and somewhat retreating, consistent with her family tradition, Lorraine was a leader as a child. She became president of both the Ivyettes and the Gadabouts clubs, social organizations that bourgeois Black people created for their children. However, as she recalled, these children of the elite were not the ones whom she sought out for friendship. Instead she was drawn to the throngs. Lorraine sustained the greatest admiration for the children of the working class. She found them appealing because, as she described it, “they fought back.” She was taken by their demands for respect and willingness to make those demands physical: “The girls as well as the boys. They fought. If you were not right with them there they were after school, waiting for you, a little gang of them in their gym shoes, blocking off the sidewalk. Face to face with the toughest the dialogue began.”¹⁴

Lorraine, though flourishing according to the rules of the bourgeois, stepped away from its standards of evaluation and mandates of respectability. She liked the rough and tumble self-regard of children who weren’t afraid of conflict or assertion.

There is a certain poetry that in the year Lorraine turned ten, the year of the exhibition, and the year when the Hansberry v. Lee case was decided, Richard Wright’s Native Son was published. It was a Chicago novel, identified as a protest novel by some, and an immediate best seller through the popular Book of the Month Club. Wright’s unflinching depiction of Chicago’s poor and Black South Side featured a deliberately unredeemable antihero in the form of Bigger Thomas. He was not, as Lorraine would describe her peers, self-possessed, clever, and proud. He was defined by his condition of oppression, so much so that any sense of self outside his circumstance couldn’t be found. Wright’s indictment of American racism in the form of a monstrous character elicited ire from many sectors of Black America. However, his literary brilliance shaped the legacy of Black Chicago and its writers, even those who were still yet to be, like Lorraine. Though it is unlikely that she read Native Son at age ten, she knew a Black Chicago writer, born in Mississippi like her father, had appeared on the national stage. It was another example of Black striving and achievement in her midst.

Lorraine graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary and matriculated at Englewood High School in 1944. During her years at Englewood, notwithstanding her love of reading and her gift for leadership, she wasn’t an outstanding student. She described herself as “not . . . particularly bright. . . . I had some popularity and a premature desire, probably irritating, to be accepted in my circle on my terms.”¹⁵ Lorraine was average at most academic things: she received a C in stage design and a C in contemporary literature. In a somewhat sweet irony, she received a D in theater. But her intellectualism was apparent despite a mediocre academic performance. On a kitschy quiz she filled out during high school years, she answered questions in ways that showed what an active mind she possessed.¹⁶ Under the heading “Favorite Book” she chose two. The first was the controversial white Southern author Lillian Smith’s novel Strange Fruit, the story of an interracial romance between an upper-class white boy named Tracy and an intelligent and beautiful Black girl named Nonnie. In it, Tracy impregnates Nonnie, and, in a bit of Shakespearean intrigue, initially plans to pay a Black man to marry her to preserve her reputation. But then at the last minute Tracy decides to admit that he loves Nonnie. Before he is able to do so, Tracy is murdered, and the proposed fiancé, Big Henry, is falsely accused of the crime and lynched. It was socially relevant and truly melodramatic. Teenaged Lorraine’s other favorite novel was River George, African American author George Lee’s 1937 semiautobiographical tale about a college-educated Tennessee sharecropper who is implicated in a murder case and has to flee to Memphis to save his own life.

Lorraine’s taste for drama extended to her favorite songs: the graduation tune “Pomp and Circumstance” and the early 1940s romantic hit “Black Magic.” The latter seemed to have a double meaning, both an adolescent yearning for romance and her own sense of mysticism associated with “Blackness” itself.

Likewise, Lorraine’s heroes were Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian Revolution, and Hannibal, the North African general. Again, inklings of her deep sense of purpose matched with a romantic sensibility are evident, as are glimmers of her nascent far leftist politics and her attraction to “working people” and the peasantry. She listed her favorite author as the Nobel Prize–winning Pearl Buck, who narrated the lives of Chinese peasants, and among her favorite songs an Irish folk tune called “The Kerry Dance.” Lorraine’s early political inclinations, ones that departed from her parents’, were shaped by the range of people she encountered. In addition to several well-known Black socialists who visited her home, Lorraine was mentored by a downstairs neighbor, Ray Hansborough, a Black man with a strident pen and passionate political commitments, who was a member of the Communist Party and who served as the secretary of the National Negro Commission. More broadly, Lorraine came of age in the throes of the most urgent Black political debates of the day—integrationism versus internationalism, capitalism versus socialism, upward mobility or grassroots organizing—and she reveled in the ideas. The debates were at school and also at home. Future civil rights organizer James Forman, who was a year ahead of Lorraine at Englewood High School, in his 1972 memoir, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, recalled their time together. He wrote, “I felt stimulated all the time, excited about what I read and the talks I had with fellow students. A key factor was the intense internationalism of this wartime and post war period. Half the world had united to fight fascism; the United States and the Soviet Union were allies. Our studies at school took place unfettered by the Communist bugaboo that swept in later. No topic was taboo in class.”¹⁷

Black soldiers who were returning from World War II were emboldened in their fight against racism. The students were aware and invested in national and international debates. Lorraine and Forman (whose nickname was Rufus) were often sucked into them, sometimes on the same side and sometimes opposed. Although she was distinctly passionate about the world, she came of age in a time and place that facilitated this passion. Her growing political sophistication allowed her to understand what it meant to live in a ghetto and how ghettoization connected her to people across the globe—whether in Warsaw or India.

Unexpectedly, two months before Lorraine’s sixteenth birthday, tragedy struck. Her father, Carl Hansberry, died. The loss would haunt her for the remainder of her life. He collapsed far away, in Mexico, stricken by a brain aneurysm. Carl had bitterly decided there was little hope for a racially integrated and just life in the United States, and he planned to move his family south of the border, a decision that a small but determined collection of African Americans, including Langston Hughes’s father, had made in the past. Despite all his patriotism, Carl had given up the fight for racial equality in America. And he lost, far away from his family. The telegram Mrs. Hansberry sent to her children from Mexico read, “Daddy passed will be home as soon as possible with body be brave. Mother.”¹⁸

I have no detailed record of his funeral services or the contours of Lorraine’s grief. But the return to her father—honoring him, arguing with him, thinking about the aftermath of his death—is all over her work as a writer. She remained unreconciled to his death, and most of us who have lost those we love dearly can feel this in our own chests and throats. Thereafter, Lorraine also expunged all conventional American patriotism from her heart. That mythology couldn’t sustain even one of its most loyal Black believers, her dead father. And certainly not his youngest child.

But she went on.

The remainder of Lorraine’s high school days were far from mundane. Maybe they distracted her from grief. At least one event in school further shaped her attitude toward America and its failures. Englewood High School was integrated. The mixed student body seemed fairly amiable until the administration was forced to increase its proportion of Black students. The composition of the neighborhood had changed and overcrowding plagued the city’s all Black schools. Soon, more Black youth flooded Englewood’s halls. This angered Lorraine’s white schoolmates. In response, in the spring of 1947, white students staged a strike. The drama that Lorraine remembered (and put into a short story) centered less on the white students and their slurs and jeers than on Black students and their response, and specifically the different types of Black students’ responses. At her school, with its more carefully assimilated population, “well-dressed colored students, like myself, had stood amusedly around, simply staring at the mob of taunting whites, and showing not the least inclination to assert racial pride.” But then another group of Black students, who heard about the white student strike, arrived. These were kids from Wendell Phillips High School. She referred to them as “The Veterans”: “Carloads of them, waving baseball bats. The word had gone—into the ghetto. [. . .] And so they had come, pouring out of the bowels of the ghetto: the children of the Unqualified Oppressed; the children of the Black working class in their costumes of pegged pants and conked heads and tight anklets held up by rubber bands.”¹⁹

They fought back. And the resistance of the working class and poor Black youth had results. The mayor met with school board members and the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, and soon thereafter a public statement was released by the Chicago school board reiterating that segregation was illegal. Police dispersed the striking students, arrested some, and made them and their parents listen to a lecture about the wrongs of their actions, which would, if persisted, result in disciplinary action against them as truants. The postwar shift toward liberal integrationism undoubtedly played a role in the willingness of the city to act finally on behalf of Black young people. But in Lorraine’s fictionalized version of events, the boldness of the Wendell Phillips students was the most important force. Her literary indictment of bourgeois passivity (and of her own social class) comes in a moment in Young, Gifted and Black when she ventriloquized a simple shout of the Wendell Phillips students: “WE BETTER GO CAUSE THEM LITTLE CHICKENSHIT NIGGERS OUT THERE AINT ABOUT TO FIGHT.”²⁰

Lorraine would fictionalize this event in another unpublished short story called “The Riot.” What is interesting in that version is that it pivots around a standoff between a Black student and a white police officer eager to brutalize the youth. In “The Riot” she changed the direction of the insult “chickenshit.” A Black boy uses the term to describe the white student protestors, rather than directing it toward the assimilated Black students. In this version, Lorraine created a collective Black consciousness; together the kids resisted white attacks and police violence. She chose to create something different from what she often saw: a weak and compliant Black middle class whose elitism created a persistent tension with the rest of the Black community, notwithstanding that all of Black Chicago lived behind the veil together.

Lorraine was ashamed of the snobbery and fearfulness of Black elites. She embraced a “we” that was larger and bolder than her bourgeois origins. But most of all in the story, one feels her sense of frustration that the tension of the moment, the possibility that it might lead to a larger movement, was lost. There’s a climax, a lot of talk, and finally the distraction of Christmas shopping undermines it all. She wanted to keep the fight alive.

Perhaps the loss of her father, and the losses of his brand of fighting for racial justice, made the fight of the teenagers from Wendell Phillips all the more invigorating. A different kind of fight might yield different kinds of results. But perhaps too Lorraine saw fighting of whichever sort to be part of her calling, following in her father’s footsteps, because she became the person in the family who would carry forward his tradition of activism, despite her departure from his methods.

In Lorraine’s senior year, she served as the president of the Forum, a debate organization of both Black and white students. Among their topics that year were the current politics and histories of Russia and Palestine, and they hosted a major debate against Austin High School with the topic “Should the federal government require arbitration of all labor disputes in basic American industries?” She was engaged with global political concerns and the particular trouble of racial injustice in the United States. She decided she wanted to become a journalist when she grew up (earlier she had expressed an interest in law). Though teenagers are fickle aspirants, Lorraine’s political sophistication and passion for reading, writing, and justice made journalism an appropriate and likely career aspiration.

But she was still a kid when she graduated from Englewood High School in 1948. The comments of her peers on the pages of her yearbook suggest both her youthfulness and her inscrutability. They call her “swell” and “nice” though disorganized. One wrote, “In 1960s when we’ll both be matrons I’ll remember your off key singing, your junky locker, financial problems in general, maladjustments galore and most of all for your never seeming to get anywhere on time.” The teasing is playful, but also suggests a lingering sense of misfittedness. One inscription, however, reads differently.

Dear Lorraine,

These years I’ve known you have been the most wonderful in all my life. You don’t know how I lived for each day when I could come to school each morning and behold your wonderful face. And now that we are parting I don’t know how I will go on. Please hurry back to me Dear one. I would like to murder you.

Yours always,²¹

The signature is scratched out. It appears to read “Anita,” and something else is written on top, in its stead. It might be “Lynn.” It might be “Lipid.” This palimpsest, seventy years later, as I attempt to piece together Lorraine’s story is at first tempting. I want to unearth the first layer by deduction. Which girls’ names began and ended in A? I ask myself, going through page by page. But then I decide to leave the mystery intact. The task of the biographer is always incomplete. No matter how meticulous she takes herself to be, the biographer mustn’t venture from archaeology to intrusion or wild speculation, despite the intriguing possibilities of the latter two. The word scratched out could mean a number of things: secrecy, an inside joke, a romantic reference, a lifelong attachment. I don’t know. What is clear is that for some young woman at Englewood High School, Lorraine was a source of joy. And, in adolescent melodramatic form, the end of their daily life together felt disastrous. This detail added a softness to my digging, which so often for the early years of Lorraine’s life seemed to yield a sense of melancholy, loneliness, and intellectual yearning, but never intimacy.

Maybe that’s why she stepped off the beaten track so many times, starting in 1948. Had Lorraine been a conventional young, Black, middle-class woman, she would have gone to study at a historically Black college or university; probably the academically distinguished Fisk or to Howard University where her uncle Leo taught. But Lorraine chose to step into uncharted territory: the large, progressive, and populist University of Wisconsin at Madison, where only a smattering of Black students had enrolled since 1875. Her first major life decision, though a temporary one, would set her on an unexpected and extraordinary course.