Although chiefly known as an award-winning dramatist and author of the classic Broadway hit A Raisin in the Sun (produced in 1959), Lorraine Hansberry was a significant voice in the Civil Rights era. Beyond her playwriting, Hansberry wrote journalism, essays, and public letters, and gave speeches as well as radio and television interviews. Her chosen genre of drama, however, may have been shaped at least in part by the Chicago Renaissance school’s stylistic emphases on urban speech and spoken language. Like the Chicago Renaissance’s principal figure, Richard Wright, who wrote for the Daily Worker and New Masses, Hansberry’s early work as a journalist enabled her to draw upon underlying Black aesthetic traditions that employ spoken language as a means of producing what Lawrence Rodgers claims as Chicago’s unique heritage as the home base of the “new vocabulary of documentary realism, sociological detail and violent black agency”1 with which to portray Black urban America. As a younger member of the Chicago Renaissance, Hansberry’s work drew upon both aesthetic and political traditions of the city such as the poetic inspirations of blues and jazz, the political and sociological realism of Wright, and the modernist, womanist breadth of Marita Bonner. Doris Abramson notes the similarity between Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Wright’s Native Son by observing that both works are set in Chicago’s South Side, that both of the central male characters (Walter Lee Younger and Bigger Thomas) work as chauffeurs and that in reaction to racism both characters explode, albeit in different ways.2 Like Bonner, and her Chicago predecessor Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hansberry’s writing took on the triple jeopardy of race, class, and gender oppression with uncompromising vitality and conviction. Whether exploring topics such as African colonialism or American racism, her writings spoke against the poison of all oppressions, including sexism and homophobia. Jewelle L. Gomez writes that “many critics have neglected the full ramifications of Hansberry’s life as a cultural worker” and that contemporary scholars have yet to “rediscover the depth and breadth of Hansberry’s social and political concerns and to see how they are manifest in her work.”3
Although Hansberry died tragically in 1965 of cancer at the age of 34, her dramatic writing continues to be read, produced, and discussed throughout the world. In addition to her plays A Raisin in the Sun (1959), The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1965), Robert Nemiroff’s posthumous adaptation of her writings To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969), and her posthumously published Les Blancs (1972), The Drinking Gourd (1972), and What Use Are the Flowers (1972), Hansberry was an active writer and speaker. As a public intellectual, she wrote public letters to The Ladder, the New York Times, and The Village Voice. Her writings, interviews, and speeches were published in the the Black Scholar, Commentary, Cross Currents, Ebony, Esquire, Freedom, Freedomways, Liberation, Masses and Mainstream, The Monthly Review, Negro Digest, Theater Arts, and The Village Voice. She gave speeches at New York’s Town Hall, the American Academy of Psycho-Therapists, the American Society of African Culture, the United Negro College Fund, and, at age 22, to the Inter-Continental Peace Congress in Uruguay. In 1959, her television interview with journalist Mike Wallace was broadcast on national television. That same year, a Chicago station broadcast a debate between Hansberry and the film director Otto Preminger about his direction of the film Porgy and Bess. That year she was also interviewed by Chicago radio host Studs Terkel who inquired extensively about her political views as well as her hit play, A Raisin in the Sun. In 1961 she participated in a radio symposium on “The Negro in American Culture” with, among others, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. In 1963 she took part in a historic meeting between civil rights leaders and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. According to James Baldwin (1979), Hansberry ended the meeting after Kennedy denied her request for a moral commitment. Baldwin describes that “The meeting ended with Lorraine standing up. She said … ‘I am very worried about the state of the civilization which produced that photograph of the White cop standing on that Negro woman’s neck in Birmingham.’”4
Born May 19, 1930, Hansberry’s middle-class family lived in Chicago’s South Side Black neighborhood where the minority middle-class and professional Black population lived in ghettos side by side with Blacks of all classes. She was the youngest of four children and her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a real estate broker and businessman who founded one of the first Black banks in Chicago. Her mother Nannie Perry Hansberry was a former school teacher originally from Tennessee whose father had been born a slave. Both parents were active in community life, politics, and civil rights organizations such as NAACP and the Urban League. Carl Hansberry was a U.S. Marshall who also ran for Congress, and both he and Nannie were, as were most northern Blacks of their generation, Republicans. In fact, when Hansberry was four years old, Chicago Democrat Arthur W. Mitchell, the first Black democrat elected to Congress in American history, defeated incumbent Republican Oscar Stanton De Priest, who was the first African American elected to Congress in the twentieth century. Throughout her youth, the Hansberry home was a gathering place of influential African American leaders and artists such as W. E. B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, and Paul Robeson. Another frequent visitor to the home was Hansberry’s uncle, William Leo Hansberry, a professor of African history at Howard University and widely considered a distinguished scholar of Africa. Professor Hansberry, aka “Uncle Leo,” often brought African students and exiles with him on his visits to the Hansberrys’ home and later had a university in Nigeria named after him. The frequent visits of these prominent figures influenced the development of the young Hansberry’s intellectual, political, and artistic sensibilities and commitments.
Hansberry’s life underwent significant transition when in 1937 her father bought and moved the family into a home in the racially restricted White Chicago neighborhood of Woodlawn. Not long after the Hansberrys moved to the new home, the neighbors responded with violence, forming a mob in front of the house and throwing bricks, one of which nearly hit the eight-year-old Hansberry. At one point, the NAACP had to provide armed guards to protect the family. With the assistance of the NAACP, Carl Hansberry proceeded to fight assiduously against the restrictive racial covenant. In his legal case, Hansberry v. Lee, Carl Hansberry claimed that the Woodlawn covenant infringed upon his Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process. Initially both the District and State Supreme Courts evicted the Hansberrys and upheld the neighborhood association’s claim to maintain a racially restrictive covenant that barred African Americans from owning or living in the neighborhood. But in 1940 the lower court decisions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that White neighborhoods cannot legally exclude African Americans. Unfortunately, because the case was resolved on a legal technicality having little to do with the Hansberrys’ claim, other race-based housing restrictions continued in Chicago. Bitter over continuing racism in the United States and especially over the racial discrimination and segregation of the U.S. military during World War II—where Lorraine’s brother Carl Jr. served in a segregated unit—Carl Hansberry bought a home in Mexico City, where he planned to move the family. Unfortunately, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1945 at the age of fifty-one before the family could move out of the country. The family had returned to South Side Chicago where Hansberry graduated from segregated Englewood High School in 1948. These experiences of race hatred were deeply formative for Hansberry, who, twenty years later, drew upon the Woodlawn incident to form the basis of her play A Raisin in the Sun.
In 1948 Hansberry left Chicago to attend college at the predominantly white University of Wisconsin in Madison, unlike the rest of the Hansberry family who had attended Howard University. At Wisconsin she studied journalism, theater, and the visual arts. Racism prohibited her from living in the women’s dormitory, so she lived off-campus in a residence called Langdon Manor, where she was the first Black student resident.5 Although she enjoyed the personal independence and political opportunities college offered, she was less enthusiastic about science courses and preferred instead art and writing courses. In her extracurricular activities, Hansberry was powerfully influenced by a production of Sean O’Casey’s play about Irish peasants, Juno and the Paycock, as well as her readings of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. While in college she also joined the Young Progressives of America, with whom she worked on the 1948 presidential campaign of third-party candidate Henry Wallace. Although she was disillusioned with politics when democrat Harry Truman was elected, she herself was elected chair of the Madison chapter of the Young Progressives. She also joined the Labor Youth League. During this period, Hansberry began cultivating an interest in theatrical stage design and also studied painting in Chicago and Mexico. In 1950 she left college for New York, where she believed her prospects as a writer lay. Hansberry’s first publication was a 1950 poem published in Masses and Mainstream and titled “Flag from a Kitchenette Window.” In the poem, the twenty-year-old Hansberry depicts the contradictions between American racism and its hypocritical ideals of freedom and democracy from the perspective of a South Side Chicago on Memorial Day: “Southside morning / America is crying / In our land: the paycheck taxes to / Somebody’s government / Black boy in a window; Algiers and Salerno / The three-colored banner raised to some / Anonymous freedom, we decide / And on the memorial days hang it / From our windows and let it beat the / Steamy jimcrow airs.”6 These sociopolitical themes, including the nascent critique of African colonialism, persisted as central concerns of her writing throughout her career.
After moving to New York City in 1950, Hansberry soon joined with radical Black and Communist activists (including her future husband), and in 1951 began working at Freedom, the progressive Black paper founded by Paul Robeson and edited by Louis Burnham. In 1952 she was named an associate editor of the paper. She served first as writer and reporter and for a short while as associate editor, until 1955. John Oliver Killens, who worked at Robeson and DuBois’s Council on African Affairs (which was housed in the same building as Freedom on 125th Street in Harlem) describes her when she first came to New York. “I remember her as a brilliant young woman … as an artist she saw the paradox and irony of every human being’s sojourn on this earth, especially where Black Americans are concerned.”7 Freedom was a short-lived Black newspaper started in 1950 at a time when both Robeson and DuBois were being harassed, ostracized, and silenced by fallout from the fanaticisms of Cold War McCarthyism.8 In his biography of DuBois, Manning Marable’s9 description of Freedom suggests that it may have been one of the few, if only, Black newspapers of the 1950s not capitulating to the censorious pressures of the red scare. The paper featured regular columns by Robeson, DuBois, and Alice Childress. Nevertheless, it was a small paper with meager financial resources. In spite of holding fundraisers and putting out frequent desperate pleas for support, the paper folded in 1955. During her career at Freedom, Hansberry wrote on a wide variety of topics including book and theater reviews, local labor and civil rights news, and international news, including articles about burgeoning independence movements in Africa, including Ghana, Egypt, and Kenya. These news stories, in addition to the influences of her Uncle Leo’s scholarship and DuBois’s Pan-Africanism, may have influenced the later writing of her unfinished play about African colonialism, Les Blancs. She took a year-long seminar on Africa with DuBois and wrote a paper entitled “The Belgian Congo: A Preliminary Report on Its Land, Its History, and Its People.”
In 1953 Hansberry married Robert Barron Nemiroff, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants, graduate student in English at NYU, political activist, and song-writer, whom she met on a picket line protesting racial discrimination in college athletics. After the marriage, the couple moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village. At that time Hansberry quit her full-time job at Freedom (although she continued to write articles) in order to focus on playwriting. While working at a variety of temporary jobs such as typist, department store clerk, waitress, hostess, cashier, and theatrical production associate, she worked on several plays, a novel, and an opera. In 1956, Nemiroff and his friend Burt D’Lugoff wrote a hit song, “Cindy, Oh Cindy,” that generated enough income to enable Hansberry to quit her temporary jobs and focus on writing full-time. One year later, in 1957, she completed her first play, A Raisin in the Sun. When she read the draft to Nemiroff and D’Lugoff, as well as their mutual friend, the theatrical impresario Philip Rose, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Rose agreed nearly immediately to produce the play and began soliciting financial investments, actors, and directors. After considerable struggle to raise enough money to produce the play, wildly successful productions were staged in New Haven, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and finally New York. Janet Tripp quotes the play’s director Lloyd Richards reflecting on how close the play came to not being produced: “It took more than a year to raise the money. There were more investors in A Raisin in the Sun than in any production that has ever appeared on Broadway. The biggest investment was $750; the average was $250 … several times the project was almost jettisoned.”10 When the play finally opened at Broadway’s Ethel Barrymore Theater on March 11, 1959, it ran for an astonishing 538 performances and Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play of the Year, becoming the first Black playwright and fifth woman to win the prestigious award. The 1959 production of A Raisin in the Sun was the first play in Broadway history to be written by an African American woman, as well as the first to be directed by an African American, Lloyd Richards. The cast included future film star Sidney Poitier making his first Broadway appearance, as well as Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, and Diana Sands. Since its 1959 opening, A Raisin in the Sun has been translated into dozens of languages and performed thousands of times in hundreds of cities all over the world. In the United States, the play has had five significant runs: two theatrical Broadway runs in 1959 and 2004, a 1973 run as a musical, a 1961 film, and a PBS TV production in 1989. Each of these five productions garnered great critical acclaim and not an inconsiderable number of award nominations and awards.
Written when Hansberry was twenty-seven years old, the play A Raisin In the Sun tells the story of a five-member intergenerational African American, South Side Chicago family. The family are at odds about how to spend the $10,000 life insurance benefit of their recently deceased father who had been a railroad porter. The family matriarch, Mama (Lena) Younger (played by McNeil), wants the family—which includes her college-student daughter Beneatha (played by Sands), her son Walter Lee (played by Poitier) who works as a chauffeur, her daughter-in-law Ruth (played by Dee) who works as a maid, and her adolescent grandson Travis (played by Glynn Turman)—to move out of their cramped ghetto apartment and into a spacious home in a White neighborhood surrounded by trees and grass. Referring to inadequate ghetto housing and usurious ghetto prices, Lena says the home “is the nicest place for the least amount of money.”11 Although three of the four adults in the family work full-time, collectively they can barely afford the dingy two-bedroom apartment in which Travis must sleep in the living room on the couch. Mama also wants to use some of the money to support Beneatha’s plans to attend medical school. Walter Lee, however, is opposed to Mama’s plans and wants instead to invest the life insurance money in a liquor store business and from there climb what looks to him like the ladder of sweet success. The central conflict of the play occurs when, after Mama had placed $3500 as a down payment for the house in the White neighborhood, Walter Lee is swindled out of the remaining $6500 that Mama has entrusted to him for bank deposit. In the face of this tremendous financial loss, the family is next confronted with the insulting “offer” of the White neighborhood association to buy the family out of their contract on the house and thereby keep them from moving into the neighborhood. The climax of the play revolves around the family’s decision—delegated to Walter Lee by Mama—either to surrender to racism and sell the house or to reject the offer and move toward an uncertain and contested future in the segregated and racist neighborhood. In addition to the central conflicts of racism, the play also explores themes such as African liberation (introduced through Beneatha’s revolutionary Nigerian suitor, Asagai), Black class snobbery (introduced through Beneatha’s rich boyfriend George Murchison), abortion (introduced through Ruth Younger’s unwanted pregnancy), sexism (woven throughout the play), and intergenerational tensions that followed the great migration of southern Blacks to Chicago. These tensions are introduced, for example, by Mama’s slapping Beneatha for doubting the existence of God and for Mama’s observation, in response to Walter Lee’s claim that money is “life,” that: “Once upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s money. I guess the world really do change.”12
Remarking on the play’s surprising success, James Baldwin wrote that “I had never in my life seen so many Black people in the theater. And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on the stage.”13 The play was often performed to standing-room–only audiences that, Abrams notes, frequently included as many Black as White audience members. Theater producer and director Woodie King Jr. describes how the play “opened doors within my consciousness that I never knew existed. There I was in Detroit’s Cass theater, a young man who had never seen anywhere a Black man (Walter Lee) express all the things I felt but never had the courage to express—and in a theater full of Black and White people, no less!”14 Yet in spite of the play’s longstanding success, the critical reception of A Raisin in the Sun was mixed. On the one hand, thousands of audience members, Black and White, enthusiastically celebrated the play. Some White critics from major New York newspapers described the play as “honest drama” that “has no axe to grind” and “will make you proud of human beings.” Harold Cruse quotes a New York Times reviewer who wrote that “The leading character is, to be sure, a Negro, but his principal problems have nothing to do with his race. They are pre-eminently the problems of the human being as such, for this is, so far as I can recall, one of the first consciously existentialist novels [sic] to be written by an American.”15 Scholars such as Lloyd W. Brown in 1974 and, later, Ben Keppel in 1995, note how these universalist interpretations obscured the play’s criticism of racism as well as of capitalism itself. As Keppel notes: “A Raisin in the Sun is an intriguing play, one that appropriates a traditional narrative form to press a point entirely alien to the mainstream of 1959: that the liberation of the American Negro required confronting economic forces and arrangements that according to Hansberry, racism exists to perpetuate. This, however, was not the reason for the enthusiasm with which the play was greeted by the White critical establishment.”16
Contrary to the majority of White critics, Black Arts critics such as Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) and Cruse as well as some White critics and writers such as Nelson Algren, criticized A Raisin in the Sun as bourgeois and assimilationist drama. Baraka wrote that “young militants” like himself “thought Hans-berry’s play was part of the ‘passive resistance’ phase of the movement, which was over the minute Malcolm’s penetrating eyes and words began to charge through the media with deadly force. We thought her play ‘middle class’ in that its focus seemed to be on ‘moving into White folks’ neighborhoods.’”17 Critic Harold Cruse, author of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, wrote that the play’s very success as well as the “patronizing critical exhuberance” of theater critics itself was proof that it was unthreatening to White racism: “Not a dissenting critical note was to be heard from Broadway critics, and thus the Negro made theater history with the most cleverly written piece of glorified soap opera I, personally, have ever seen on a stage.”18 Even as recently as 1990, the Black film scholar Donald Bogle claimed that “the film celebrated integration and ultimately paid homage to the America of free enterprise and materialism.”19 This struggle over the interpretation of A Raisin in the Sun reflects similar struggles experienced by African American writers of both the Harlem and Chicago Renaissance, who were torn between politically conservative but aesthetically radical choices and aesthetically conservative but politically radical choices.
At the time of the play’s opening run, Hansberry objected to both the majority White and the Black Arts interpretations of the play and said so in a number of published essays and interviews. She argued that the tensions between the characters of Mama and Walter Lee in the play should not simply be seen, as some White critics suggested, as the expression of “typical” U.S. intergenerational struggle. Nor should they merely be seen, as some Black critics suggested, as the expression of integrationist and assimilationist aspirations. Instead, she argued that the tensions evoke the complex and historically grounded experiences particular to Black Americans that emerge at the intersection of capitalism, slavery, reconstruction, northern racism, and sexism. When Studs Terkel asked how she would answer the critics’ claim that A Raisin in the Sun is not really a Negro play, she said: “I believe one of the soundest ideas in dramatic writing is [that] in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is. In other words, I have told people that not only is the play about a Negro family, specifically and culturally, but it’s not even a New York family or a southern Negro family—it is specifically South Side Chicago. To the extent we accept them and believe them as who they’re supposed to be, to that extent they can become everybody. So I would say it is definitely a Negro play before it is anything else.”20 In a letter to her mother, Hansberry writes that A Raisin in the Sun is “a play that tells the truth about people, Negroes and life and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are—and just as mixed up—but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks—people who are the very essence of human dignity.”21
In more recent times, former Black Arts critic Amiri Baraka has rescinded his earlier criticisms of the play. In a 1995 essay commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun, Baraka wrote: “The truth is that Hansberry’s dramatic skills have yet to be properly appreciated—and not just by those guardians of the status quo who pass themselves off as drama critics.”22 In his 1972 introduction to Les Blancs, Julius Lester noted that Malcolm X had placed a down payment on a suburban home just “a few weeks before he was murdered. And one surely can’t accuse Malcolm of bourgeois aspirations.”23 Lester commented on the play’s criticisms of materialism and the “American Dream”: “As Blacks acquire more and more of America’s material offerings, are they, too, going to be transformed by their acquisitions into mindless consumers like the majority of Whites? Or are they going to continue to walk the path of righteousness like their forebears?”24 Lester argues that contrary to arguments made by former Black Arts critics, the play in fact rejects the myth that Blacks want to be integrated with Whites. He says the fact that the neighborhood the Youngers plan to move into “is White is the least important thing about it. It merely happened to be the neighborhood in which Mama Younger could find a nice house she could afford.”25 Other recent scholars have further explored the play’s political criticisms of race, class, and gender. Neal A. Lester explores how the play offers a critique of sexist Black manhood and male chauvinism “at a time when collective Black identity was couched in the values of rhetoric and Black manhood.”26 Lester argues that both Walter Lee and Asagai press Beneatha to adopt traditional gender roles, such as when Walter Lee ridicules Beneatha’s desire to become a doctor and Asagai sees her as “his American cultural conquest, a symbol of his own vainglory.”27 Keppel describes how the play explored the relationship between racism and economic exploitation and “sought to re-establish the salience and legitimacy of the leftist and Marxian critique that had been publicly purged from American discourse during the early fifties … The crux of the problem as Lorraine Hansberry saw it was American capitalism itself.”28
Two days after the 1959 production of A Raisin in the Sun opened, one of the play’s producers, David Susskind, began soliciting interest in a film version of the play. By the fall of 1959, Columbia Pictures had bought the rights to A Raisin in the Sun, hired Hansberry to write the screenplay, and was in search of a director. According to Steven Carter, Hansberry’s first choice of director was Sidney Lumet who had directed the award-winning courtroom social drama 12 Angry Men in 1957 and later went on to direct three play-to-cinema translations, two by Eugene O’Neill and one by Tennessee Williams. But the studio ultimately contracted with the young film director Daniel Petrie as well as the original cast.
Hansberry’s original screenplay of A Raisin in the Sun, which was not published until 1992, takes full advantage of cinema as a story-telling medium. The screenplay opens by directing the camera to pan across the exterior of the South Side Chicago city landscape, backyards, boulevards, and kitchenettes while superimposing lines from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” in Montage of a Dream Deferred over panning shots of the city. The lines from the poem read “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up / like a raisin in the Sun / Or fester like a sore—/And then run?”29 Later, the screenplay directs the camera to capture a series of montage scenes depicting the Calumet Highway at night, the steel mills of Chicago, the stockyards, the Chicago Loop at midday, the South Side, and the Negro Soldier’s monument. Her notes for the screenplay describe the Younger family’s apartment, its weary furnishings, the tiny kitchen, and the single window that is the apartment’s sole source of natural light. She describes how, in Chicago’s South Side ghetto, rents are disproportionately higher than in any other places in the city and that to move to a larger apartment would “exhaust them financially since the hard-earned combined wages of the three income-making members must feed, clothe, and house five people.30
Throughout the screenplay, Hansberry directs the camera to illustrate how, in Margaret Wilkerson’s words, “the many subtle ways in which racism invades the characters’ lives on a daily basis.”31 The script relies on mise-en-scene and cinematography to chronicle some of the myriad ways that racism manifests in everyday life. For example, the screenplay contains a new scene depicting Mama’s last day of work at her employer’s household, the Holidays. The scene illustrates the complexity of interracial and interclass relations such as Mama’s uncompromisingly loving attachment to her young White charge and Mrs. Holiday’s dawning awareness of Mama’s humanity and the economic injustices that keep Blacks available to Whites as low-wage workers. Mrs. Holiday’s complicity is revealed when Mama describes to Mrs. Holiday’s “innocent” surprise, the harsh conditions of her working life, which include a story about a former employee who says, after Lena asks for a raise, “Why, Lee-na! I never thought to hear you-ou talk as if you thought of this as a job.”32 Another new scene involves Walter Lee in a park observing a political orator on a ladder who exhorts a crowd of listeners with revolutionary rhetoric. He says, “Everywhere on the African continent today the Black man is standing up and telling the White man that there is someplace for him to go—back to that small cold continent where he came from—Europe! Well then—how long before this mood of Black men everywhere else in the world touches us here? How long!”33
In another new scene of Walter at work, Hansberry directs the camera to pan the elegantly furnished dining room of his employer where Walter’s employer’s wife, Mrs. Arnold, lounges comfortably at home. The camera contrasts the Arnold home with the Younger home, the leisure and affluence of Mrs. Arnold with the hardworking exploitation of the two Mrs. Youngers, and the life of White privilege through the angry eyes of Walter. With close-up shots of four of the characters’ hands, the camera links consecutive scenes of Mama and Walter at work, from “extreme close shot of Lena’s hands fixing bedding” and “extreme close up of Lena’s hands working at buttons on a coat,”34 to close-ups of Walter Lee buttoning up his livery. Subsequent shots direct the camera to deep focus backgrounds that maintain foreground focus on Walter’s hands, his employer Mrs. Arnold’s “manicured hand,” and then a close-up of Mr. Arnold’s hands moving back his cuff to look at his watch. The screenplay also includes another new scene to illustrate ghetto price-gouging. In the scene Lena encounters a surly White clerk. The script reads:
Got the nerve to be askin’ people thirty-five cents for them apples look like they was on the scene when Moses crossed over. Just think the Southside is the garbage dump of this city where you can sell all the trash don’t nobody else in America want. Wouldn’t be tryin’ to sell ’em over yonder where I work.35
After Lena refuses the purchase, the camera follows her to a streetcar and then shifts to an extreme close-up of “large, red, voluptuous apples” in Chicago’s famous “open markets” enjoyed primarily by White shoppers. Another important and brief addition to the screenplay occurs when the family travels to Clybourne Park (the “White neighborhood”) to visit the new house Mama has bought. Hansberry’s directions instruct the camera to roam the neighborhood:
There is an imposed starkness in the shot, reflecting these surroundings as they seem to Ruth and Walter. These are American homes where rather ordinary types and varieties of Americans live; but at the moment something sinister clings to them. At some windows curtains drop back quietly into place, as though those who are watching do not want to be seen; at others, shadowy figures simply move back out of view when they feel that Walter and Ruth’s gaze is upon them; at still others, those who are staring do so without apology. The faces—the eyes of women and children, in the main—look hard with a curiosity that, for the most part, is clearly hostile.36
In the end, however, over one-third of the original screenplay was cut and little of the original screenplay’s cinematic exposition was incorporated into the 1961 film, which was screened as a virtual twin of the play. In her introduction to the unfilmed screenplay, Margaret Wilkerson37 hypothesize that political objectives were behind the editing of Hansberry’s film script, and Spike Lee describes how “After I finished reading the screenplay, I went out and rented the video cassette. It seems to me that all the cuts had to deal with softening a too defiant Black voice.”38 Instead of the original screenplay’s opening montage of South Side ghetto scenes superimposed with the Langston Hughes poem, the film opens with title and credits on a gray background reminiscent of early 1950s television graphics. The poem appears neither on the screen nor the sound track. In a 1961 newspaper article, the director Daniel Petrie expressed disappointment at the time of A Raisin in the Sun’s receipt of a special Gary Cooper Award for “Outstanding Human Values” at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. Petrie describes European “complaints” about the film including excessive dialogue, limited location, and inappropriate mise-en-scene, and attributes these complaints to the final cutting of the film:
There was so little visual emphasis on the poor living conditions of the Chicago Negro family that foreign audiences didn’t see what they had to complain about. … To shorten it, most of the visual description of the neighborhood was removed, while almost all of the play’s dialogue remained. When I saw the foreign audience grow restless, I was convinced that the wrong things had been cut out.39
Similarly, Hansberry is quoted in a 1961 news article as saying that the screenplay was cut because it made the film too long and this claim is repeated in the 1992 publication of the original screenplay. However, Lisbeth Lipari40 investigates how memos and letters of studio executives suggest that the cuts were made not simply because the screenplay was too long, but because the executives thought Hansberry’s original screenplay made her criticisms of racism all too visible.
In 1973 the play was resurrected as a musical adaptation, Raisin, The Musical, and ran for 847 performances and won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1974. The musical version starred Joe Morton as Walter Lee and Debbie Allen as Beneatha. In 1989, the PBS American Playhouse produced a twenty-fifth anniversary TV version of A Raisin in the Sun starring Danny Glover as Walter Lee and Esther Rolle as Lena, and was nominated for three Emmy Awards. Like the 1959 version, the 1989 television version enjoyed awards and accolades as well as some muted criticism. In an examination of contemporary racial representations in media, bell hooks severely critiques the PBS production: “I was stunned by the way in which the contemporary re-visioning of Hansberry’s play made it no longer a counter-hegemonic cultural production but a work that fit with popular racist stereotypes of Black masculinity as dangerous, threatening, etc. Attempting to make this play accessible to a predominately White mass audience, the work was altered so that the interpretation of specific roles would correspond with prefabricated notions of Black identity, particularly Black male identity.”41 hooks goes on to describe how although she had personally talked with many Black artists and intellectuals who had serious criticisms of the play, “no one made it the subject for extensive public cultural critique.”42
Most recently, a 2004 revised Broadway version of A Raisin in the Sun boasted a nine-week run at Broadway’s Royale Theater and starred hip-hop artist and mogul Sean Puffy “P. Diddy” Combs as Walter Lee, former Cosby Show star Phylicia Rashad as Mama, Audra McDonald as Ruth, and Sanaa Lathan as Beneatha. The $2.6 million production was directed by Atlanta-based director Kenny Leon and in nine weeks recouped not only its production cost but also earned a profit of $700,000, one of the biggest weekly takes for a nonmusical play in Broadway history. The revision also earned four Tony nominations and two Tony awards. Phylicia Rashad became the first African American woman to win the Tony Award for best performance by a leading actress in a play and Audra McDonald won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. The audience reception of this production was as enthusiastic as the original 1959 production, and the critical reception far less mixed. Many critics noted that the cast, especially Sean Combs, drew younger than typical audiences to Broadway. In a 2004 radio interview with Tavis Smiley, Michael Eric Dyson said the play continues to be relevant today because Black audiences “can identify with the play’s themes of identity, of struggle for self-determination in a culture that continues to be racist.”43
During the period between the completion of Raisin in the Sun in 1957 to 1960, Hansberry was actively writing plays as well as essays, letters, and speeches. She also, as a lesbian, began exploring the nascent homophile movement and dating women. Carter quotes Nemiroff as saying that “Hansberry’s homosexuality was not a peripheral or casual part of her life but contributed significantly on many levels to the sensitivity and complexity of her view of human beings and of the world.”44 In 1957 she attended at least one meeting of the New York Chapter of the Daughter’s of Bilitis (DOB), a national lesbian organization that had been founded in San Francisco in 1955.45 Elise Harris describes Hansberry as making her “debut in to a small, almost cotillion-like lesbian set”46 that included writers Louise Fitzhugh, Patricia Highsmith, and lesbian literary pioneer Marijane Meaker, who wrote over forty novels under the pen names M. E. Kerr, Mary James, Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, and M. J. Meaker. Hansberry soon began dating Renee Kaplan, who lived around the corner from Hansberry’s Bleecker Street apartment in Greenwich Village. Although Hansberry was the only African American in this white set of lesbians, she also lived a few blocks from her close friend, the openly gay James Baldwin, with whom she also spent a great deal of time. In the spring and summer of 1957 Hansberry wrote anonymously, as was the convention at the time, two long letters to The Ladder, a lesbian publication published by DOB. Her two letters, more like mini-essays of 840 and 1340 words respectively, reflected many of Hansberry’s political concerns about racism and class oppression. But in the letters, Hansberry linked those concerns to gender and sexuality as well. Her letters sketched her concerns with separatism and assimilation, sexual ethics, and the economic and intellectual subjugation created by sexism. In May 1957, she wrote: “I feel that women, without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions, homo or hetero, indeed have a need for their own publications and organizations. Our problems, our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race. Women, like other oppressed groups of one kind or another, have particularly had to pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment that the second class status imposed on us for centuries created and sustained.”47 This point echoes arguments she made in her unfinished essay, “In Defense of the Equality of Men,” that articulates a feminist position and celebrates 19th century feminists who “set a path that a grateful society will undoubtedly, in time, celebrate.” The point is also echoed two years later in 1959 when, in an interview with Studs Terkel, she states that “Obviously the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women who are twice oppressed.”48 These themes are also discussed in her unfinished essay, “Simone De Beauvoir and the Second Sex: An American Commentary, an Unfinished Essay-in-Progress,”49 where she discusses pornography, women’s economic position in society, and the politics of housework. And while scholars have noted that none of Hansberry’s plays revolve around a central female protagonist, earlier versions of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and of the play Les Blancs centered around female characters who were later rewritten as male—Sidney Brustein was first written as Jenny Reed, and Tshembe Matoseh from Les Blancs was first written as Candace.
Hansberry’s August Ladder letter closes with a tentative exploration of the link between homophobia and sexism: “In this kind of work [women’s intellectual labor] there may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.”50 This theme also appears in 1961 in an unpublished letter to the West Coast–based homophile publication One where Hansberry links the oppression of homosexuality to the oppression of women:
The relationship of anti-homosexual sentiment to the oppression of women has a special and deep implication. That is to say, that it must be clear that the reason for the double standard of social valuation is rooted in the societal contempt for the estate of womanhood in the first place. Everywhere the homosexual male is, in one way or another, seen as tantamount to the criminal for his deviation; and the woman homosexual as naughty, neurotic, adventurous, titillating wicked or rebellious for hers.51
In her other speeches and writings, Hansberry also expressed these concerns. In a 1959 speech to the Society for African Culture, Hansberry deconstructs what she calls the political “illusions” of her day “fostered by a year’s steady diet of television, motion pictures, the legitimate stage and the novel.”52 Among the topics Hansberry takes on in this speech are the illusions “most people who work for a living are executives, women are idiots, people are White, negroes do not exist … sex is very bad, sex is very good … war is inevitable, so are armies … any form of radicalism (except conservativism) is latent protest against Mom, toilet-training, or heterosexuality.” Later in the speech she asserts: “And as of today, if I am asked abroad if I am a free citizen of the United States of America, I must say only what is true: No.”53
During this period of her life, Hansberry and Nemiroff had begun to grow apart. In 1960, the two bought a house on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, and Harris writes that Dorothy Secules, who had rented an apartment in the house since the 1930s, remained in the apartment while Hansberry settled into the top floor.54 Not long afterwards, the two women fell in love and remained secretly together until Hansberry’s death. In 1961, Nemiroff and Hansberry bought a second property—a home in Croton-on-Hudson, a small village on the Hudson River about fifty miles from New York City. Hansberry named the home Chitterling Heights (after the southern dish of fried hog intestines more informally known as chitlins), as a whimsical allusion to her southern heritage. In order to concentrate fully on her writing, Hansberry spent many long weeks alone in the country house, eventually filling three file cabinets with work. Tripp describes Hansberry’s study as filled with images of artists, writers, and thinkers who inspired her, including a photo of Paul Robeson above her desk, a bust of Albert Einstein on the desk, and in the hallway, a picture of Sean O’Casey.55 Shortly after the success of the film version of Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was contacted by NBC producer Dore Schary about the prospect of writing a play about the Civil War. Schary’s idea was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Civil War with an NBC series of five ninety-minute teleplays. Hansberry was inspired by the idea and as a result in 1961 wrote the play The Drinking Gourd about “the peculiar institution” of slavery. Although NBC agreed to fund research and development of the series (and Hansberry says she was well paid for her efforts), the corporation later backed out due to lack of sponsorship—advertisers were dubious about the economic prospects of the series. The Drinking Gourd, titled after the name slaves on the underground railroad called the Big Dipper, explores the brutality of slavery from the perspective of both slaves and slave owners. The play tells the story of two slaves, Rissa and her son Hannibal, who are owned by an ailing “master” Hiram Sweet. Although Hiram struggles with his conscience about the mistreatment of slaves, his son Everett is a sadistic tyrant who blinds Hannibal for learning to read. Hiram, at death’s doorstep, seeks Rissa’s forgiveness claiming that he had nothing to do with Hannibal’s torment. But in the act of Hannibal’s blinding, the formerly docile and “blind” Rissa’s eyes are opened and she turns her back to the dying old man to instead care for her son. Speaking about The Drinking Gourd in a radio discussion in 1961 on the “Negro Writer in America” with James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and others, Hansberry said in reference to the teleplay: “We’ve been trying very hard … in America to pretend that this greatest conflict didn’t even have at its base the only thing it had at its base…. Person after person will write a book today and insist that slavery was not the issue.”56 During this time, Hansberry also completed work on What Use Are the Flowers, a play about life on earth after a nuclear holocaust. The play describes an interaction between a dying hermit and a few surviving children whom he teaches to cherish beauty and, literally, reinvent the wheel.
Battling severe illness that was to be diagnosed as pancreatic cancer only shortly before her death, Hansberry secretly divorced Nemiroff in the spring 1964. By that time the couple had been living apart for several years, but only a few close friends were told of the divorce. Throughout this period, Nemiroff and Hansberry had maintained a close working relationship, and three months after the divorce she named him her literary executor. Near the same time, the play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opened and ran for exactly 101 days, until her death in January. A day after the play opened, Hansberry was hospitalized after losing her sight and falling into a coma. Although she eventually awoke from the coma and regained her sight, she spent the remaining months of her life in the hospital while friends struggled financially to keep the play open. In the play Hansberry’s gaze turns from her focus on Black American life to focus on the contradictions and moral ambiguities of White liberalism. The play follows five characters living in the Bohemian and ethnically and racially mixed New York neighborhood of Greenwich Village. Sidney Brustein, the title character, is a left-wing Jewish intellectual cynic and disengaged from his prior political commitments. Although ostensibly progressive, he fails to take his wife Iris, a “Greco-Gaelic-Indian hillbilly,” seriously. The other central characters struggle with their own forms of disillusion and blindness as the play weaves through a range of topics including racism, Marxism, and political corruption. In one of the central threads of the play that eventually leads to a suicide, Sidney’s Black friend Alton Scales rejects Gloria, his White fiancée. This ill-fated relationship explores the economic dimensions of race and gender oppression when, after Alton discovers that Gloria earns her living as a high-class call girl, he tells Sidney he won’t accept a wife who is “White man’s leavings,” and explains his reasons for breaking the engagement:
Alton: Someone who has coupled with my love … used her like … an … inanimate object … a thing, an instrument … a commodity…. Don’t you understand, Sidney? Man, like I am spawned from commodities … and their purchasers. Don’t you know this? I am running from being a commodity. How do you think I got the color I am, Sidney? Haven’t you ever thought about it? I got this color from my grandmother being used as a commodity, man. The buying and the selling in this country began with me.57
But while the character Alton recognizes his own oppression and the price paid by women slaves, like the other characters in the play he is oblivious to the ways in which he is implicated in the oppression of others. This point is made by Gloria when she describes to Sidney how easy it is for women to be lured into prostitution out of economic necessity. “I was a nineteen-year-old package of fluff from Trenersville, Nowhere, and I met this nothing who took one look at the baby face of mine and said, ‘Honey, there’s a whole special market for you.’”58 Another encounter between the Brustein’s gay neighbor David, a writer, and Gloria illuminates the blindness of gay men to sexism. David, oblivious to the fact that Gloria has just been beaten, blithely declares that “Isn’t it the great tradition for writers and whores to share the world’s truths?” In response, the wincing and angry Gloria says “Look, little boy—I’ve never met you before, but I have met them like you a hundred times and I know everything you are about to say; because its been asked and written four thousand times.”59 In another scene, Alton illuminates the hostility of some Black men to gays when after telling David to “Turn off, fag face!” he storms out of the apartment saying, “I’m sorry if it makes me unsophisticated in your eyes; but after a while, hanging out with queers gets on my nerves!”60 This complex blending of the intersection of oppressions was not well received by critics, who were surprised that Hansberry should write a play not centrally concerned with matters of race. Moreover, they felt the play was too difficult and complicated and, apparently, audiences agreed. Despite its lukewarm critical reception, friends from the theatrical, literary, and political communities, including James Baldwin, Sammy Davis Jr., Ruby Dee, Shelley Winters, Ossie Davis, Anne Bancroft, and Mel Brooks, kept the play running until Hansberry’s death on January 12, 1965, when it finally closed.
Although she was very ill at the time, in 1964, Hansberry was invited to write the text for a photo documentary book titled The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. The book chronicles the history of activism and voter registration in the South and was put together by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Written while she was in and out of the hospital for radiation treatments for the cancer that would kill her in the very near future, Hansberry’s text narrated photographs of marches, lynchings, prayers, as well as segregated water fountains, countryside scenes, and poverty-stricken communities. Commenting on a photograph of armed police with attack dogs, she wrote: “What the dogs and guns and hoses have proved is that the entire power structure of the south must be altered.”61 In several places, Hansberry links racism to wider systems of economic and social exploitation. Next to a photograph of White policemen in helmets, she writes that they are “from a class of Southerners who are themselves victims of a system that has used them and their fathers before them for generations.”62 And beneath a photograph of an industrial slum, she writes: “The coming of industry into the Southland has not changed the problems of many of its people—White or Black—for the better.”63 The book concludes with photographs of young activists. Hansberry writes: “They stand in the hose fire at Birmingham; they stand in the rain at Hattiesburg. They are young, they are beautiful, they are determined. It is for us to create, now, an America that deserves them.”64
One of Hansberry’s last projects was the play Les Blancs, a work she had begun in 1960 and left unfinished at the time of her death. The play was written partly in response to French author Jean Genet’s drama Les Negres, a “clown-show” about Black nationalism that many Black critics, including Hansberry, had objected to as ignorant and derisive. As Philip Effiong writes, “Genet perpetuates the minstrel dynamic by using Black characters to lampoon Black nationalism.”65 Although Hansberry had written the thematic development, plot outline, and major speeches, the play was completed by Nemiroff and opened at the Longacre Theater in 1970. The play received wildly divergent reviews and closed after forty-seven performances. However, Les Blancs has been produced in regional theaters across the country ever since. Drawing on her lifelong interest in Africa and African history, Les Blancs presents an unambiguously powerful critique of colonialism that takes place in the mythical African country of Zatembe on the eve of revolution. Loosely based on the so-called “Mau-Mau” (a derogatory term devised by European colonists) uprising in Kenya, the play recounts the story of an African expatriate, Tshembe Matoseh, living in England who returns home for his father’s village funeral to experience imminent anticolonial revolution. Upon returning home, Tshembe encounters a range of morally compromised if not corrupt characters such as the Albert Schweitzer–like White missionary Rev. Torvald Neilsen and his wife; a White “liberal” American journalist, Charlie Morris, who had traveled to Zatembe to interview the “great” Neilsen; the brutally oppressive White colonist, Major Rice; and Tshembe’s own two brothers, Abioseh, a Catholic priest who sides with the White colonists, and Eric, a lost gay biracial man born of the rape of their mother by Major Rice.
While clearly drawing on historical events of the period as well as Hansberry’s own study of Africa, John Gruesser66 contends that Les Blancs is Hansberry’s attempt to rewrite the Eurocentric image of Africa and Africans that had long been portrayed by European writers. To do this, Gruesser claims that Hansberry draws on both African and European traditions—the oral and folk art traditions of African as well as the literary traditions of paternalist European writers whose distorted portrayals of African “natives,” be they noble or savage, equate Africa with ugliness. Hansberry herself wrote that when she was a child “everything distasteful and painful was associated with Africa. This came from school, from the movies, and from our own people who accepted this.” And while Philip Effiong explores Hansberry’s use of African customs and aesthetic practices in music, costume, and folklore in the play, Gruesser argues that Les Blancs is, among other things, an Afrocentric rendition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “Hansberry not only reassigns the blame for the falsehood and corruption of Africa to colonialism and Africanist thinking but shows that this is only the first step. As Tshembe tells Morris, merely exposing colonialist sentiments as a lie, as Conrad does in Heart of Darkness, is not enough because such falsehoods kill people.”67 In the play Tshembe argues that, like religion, or ethnicity, race is a justification for exploitation: “I am simply saying that a device is a device, but that it also has consequences: once invented it takes on a life, a reality of its own. So in one century, men invoke the device of religion to cloak their conquests. In another, race. Now, in both cases you and I may recognize the fraudulence of the device, but the fact remains that a man who has a sword run through him because he refuses to become a Moslem or a Christian—or who is shot in Zatembe or Mississippi because he is Black—is suffering the utter reality of the device.”68
Thomas P. Adler explores how Tshembe, like Sidney Brustein, is a character who moves from disengagement to commitment. Tshembe, Adler writes, is “another of Hansberry’s existential heroes who makes a series of choices that redefine him as a human being.”69 While Tshembe has a new life and a White wife in England and longs to stay removed from the uprisings, he is impelled to join the fight for independence after witnessing the open wounds of colonialism that had virtually enslaved and deracinated his people and plundered the hills for silver and gold. Tshembe understands the connection between colonialism and capitalism and, as Adler notes, “understands, too, that Whites need the hatred of Blacks to assuage their guilt for having oppressed them.”70 For example, when the “nonviolent” Morris asked Tshembe if he hates all White men, Tshembe replies “I do not ‘hate’ all White men—but I desperately wish that I did. It would make everything infinitely easier. But I am afraid that, among other things, I have seen the slums of Liverpool and Dublin and the caves above Naples. I have seen Dachau and Anne Frank’s attic in Amsterdam. I have seen too many raw-knuckled Frenchmen coming out of the Metro at dawn and too many pop-eyed Italian children to believe that those who raided Africa for there centuries ever ‘loved’ the White race either. I would like to be simple-minded for you, but, I cannot. I have, seen.”71 Like her character Tshembe, Hansberry understood all too well the moral paralysis engendered by White liberalism. In her 1964 speech to New York’s Town Hall, Hansberry urges Whites to stop being liberals and work side by side with African Americans in the struggle for Civil Rights. “The problem is we have to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the White liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.”72
When Lorraine Hansberry died on January 12, 1965, hundreds of friends and family, including Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and other intellectual and theatrical luminaries attended her funeral at a small church in Harlem presided by Rev. Eugene Callendar. Her past and present partners Renee Kaplan and Dorothy Secules served as pallbearers. McKissack and McKissack73 describe how, after the congregation sang “Abide with Me,” messages from James Baldwin (who was in France at the time) and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were read aloud by the Reverend. The telegram from Martin Luther King read, in part: “Her commitment to spirit, … her creative literary ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.”74 Other speakers, including Paul Robeson, praised her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement and extolled her work as “a precious heritage.” Julius Lester notes the irony of Hansberry’s death falling a little more than a month before Malcolm X’s assassination: “Somehow it seems like more than a coincidence that the two should die within less than a month and a half of each other and scarcely nine months before the ‘deferred dream’ exploded in the streets of Watts.”75 She is buried in Bethel Cemetery in Croton-on-Hudson, and the inscription on her tombstone quotes selections from The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. One selection is from a speech made by Sidney where he says: “The why of why we are here is an intrigue for adolescents; the how is what must command the living. Which is why I lately have become—an insurgent again!”76
At the time of her death, Hansberry left a number of unfinished essays and plays including The Arrival of Mr. Todog, a satire of Samuel Beckett’s existentialist Waiting for Godot; a play about the eighteenth century feminist and author of the 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft; as well as a libretto about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture. As with her Black Chicago Renaissance predecessors, writing was to Hansberry a political as well as an artistic act. This is evident in all her writings regardless of genre—whether it be in the full-blown critiques of racism, sexism, and capitalism in A Raisin in The Sun; of racism, homophobia, and colonialism in Les Blancs; or of capitalism and racism in her documentary text The Movement. Describing her work with Freedom editor Louis E. Burnham she says: “The things he taught me were great things: that all racism was rotten, White or Black, that everything is political.”77 And like other writers of the Chicago Renaissance, her politics and art arose from the streets of South Side. As she writes in her 1961 tribute to the Chicago painter Charles Wright in We Are of the Same Sidewalks, “Like him I came to adolescence in a community where the steel veil of oppression which sealed our ghetto encased within it a multitude of Black folk who endured every social ill known to humankind: poverty, ignorance, brutality and stupor. And, almost mystically, beside all of it: the most lyrical strengths and joys the soul can encompass. One feels that the memories of that crucible, the Chicago South Side, must live deep within the breast of this artist.”78
1. Rodgers, Lawrence R. “Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis and the Chicago Renaissance.” The Langston Hughes Review 14, 1, 2 (1996): 4–12.
2. Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the American Theater: 1925–1959. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
3. Gomez, Jewelle L. “Lorraine Hansberry: Uncommon Warrior.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Meridian, 1990, 307–17.
4. Baldwin, James. “Lorraine Hansberry at the Summit.” Freedomways 19, 4 (1979): 269–72.
5. Cheney, Anne. Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.
6. Hansberry, Lorraine. “Flag from a Kitchenette Window” (poem). Masses and Mainstream 3 (September 1950): 38–40.
7. Killens, John Oliver. “Lorraine Hansberry: On Time!” Freedomways 19, 4 (1979): 273–76.
8. Duberman, Martin Bauml. Paul Robeson. New York: Knopf, 1988.
9. Marable, Manning. W. E. B. Dubois, Black Radical Democrat. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
10. Tripp, Janet. The Importance of Lorraine Hansberry. San Diego: Lucent Books, 1998.
11. Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. New York, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, March 11, 1959.
12. Ibid.
13. Baldwin, James. “Sweet Lorraine.” In To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Vintage, 1995, xvii–xx.
14. King Jr, Woodie. “Lorraine Hansberry’s Children: Black Artists and A Raisin in the Sun.” Freedomways 19, 4 (1979): 219–22.
15. Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: New York Review, 1967, 275.
16. Keppel, Ben. The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.
17. Baraka, Amiri. “A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Sun’s Enduring Passion.” In Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Vintage, 1995.
18. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 278.
19. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum, 1990, 198.
20. Terkel, Studs. “An Interview with Lorraine Hansberry,” by Studs Terkel. WFMT Chicago Five Arts Guide 10 (April 1961): 8–14.
21. Nemiroff, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, 91.
22. Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, 10.
23. Lester, Julius. “Introduction.” In The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Random House, 1972, 8–9.
24. Ibid., 9.
25. Ibid., 11.
26. Lester, Neal A. “Seasoned with Quiet Strength: Black Womanhood in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959). In Women in Literature: Reading through the Lens of Gender, edited by Jerilyn Fisher and Ellen S. Silber. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003, 248.
27. Ibid., 247.
28. Keppel, The Work of Democracy, 202.
29. Hughes, Langston. “Harlem.” In The Poems: 1951–1967: The Collected Work of Langston Hughes, Volume 3, edited by Arnold Rampersad. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001, 74.
30. Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Signet, 1992, 5.
31. Ibid., xxxv.
32. Ibid., 40.
33. Ibid., 132–33.
34. Ibid., 31.
35. Ibid., 53–54.
36. Ibid., 155.
37. Wilkerson, Margaret. “Introduction,” In A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Signet, 1992, xxix–xliv.
38. Lee, Spike. “Commentary: Thoughts on the Screenplay.” In A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay, edited by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Signet, 1992, xlv–xlvii.
39. Archer, Eugene. “Raisin Director Plans Two Films,” New York Times, June 10, 1961, 12.
40. Lipari, Lisbeth. “‘Fearful of the Written Word’: White Fear, Black Writing, and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun Screenplay.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, 1 (2004): 81–102.
41. hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990, 2.
42. Ibid., 2.
43. “Michael Eric Dyson Commentary: ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ The Tavis Smiley Show,” June 17, 2004. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1961517.
44. Carter, Steven R. Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment amid Complexity. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991, 6.
45. Lipari, Lisbeth. “The Rhetoric of Intersectionality: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to The Ladder.” In Queering the Public Sphere, edited by Charles E. Morris. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.
46. Harris, Elise. “The Double Life of Lorraine Hansberry.” Out Magazine 70 (September 1999): 96–101, 174–75.
47. Hansberry, Lorraine. “Readers Respond.” The Ladder 1, 8 (May 1957): 26–28.
48. Terkel, Studs. “An Interview with Lorraine Hansberry,” by Studs Terkel. WFMT Chicago Five Arts Guide 10 (April 1961): 8–14.
49. Hansberry, Lorraine. “Simone De Beauvoir and the Second Sex: An American Commentary, an Unfinished Essay-in-Progress.” In Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, edited by Beverly Guy-Sheftall. New York: The New Press, 1995, 128–42.
50. “Readers Respond.” The Ladder 1, 11 (August 1957): 26–30.
51. Carter, Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment amid Complexity, 6–7.
52. Hansberry, Lorraine. “The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism.” Black Scholar 10, 4 (1981): 4.
53. Ibid., 10.
54. Harris, Out Magazine.
55. Tripp, The Importance of Lorraine Hansberry.
56. Hansberry, Lorraine. The Negro Writer in America. Audio-Forum 23062. Recorded 1961 from a WBAI-FM radio broadcast originally titled “The Negro’s Role in American Culture.”
57. Hansberry, Lorraine. The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. New York: Samuel French, 1965, 84.
58. Ibid., 106.
59. Ibid., 104.
60. Ibid., 56.
61. Hansberry, Lorraine. The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964, 60.
62. Ibid., 68.
63. Ibid., 13.
64. Ibid., 122.
65. Effiong, Philip Uko. “History, Myth, and Revolt in Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs.” African American Review 32, 2 (1998): 274.
66. Gruesser, John. “Lies That Kill: Lorraine Hansberry’s Answer to Heart of Darkness in Les Blancs.” In New Readings in American Drama, edited by Norma Jenckes. New York: Peter Lang, 2002, 44.
67. Ibid., 45.
68. Hansberry, Lorraine. Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry, ed. Robert Nemiroff. New York: Random House, 1972, 92.
69. Adler, Thomas P. American Drama, 1940–1960: A Critical History. New York: Macmillan International, 1994, 198.
70. Ibid., 199.
71. Hansberry, Les Blancs, 102–3.
72. Hansberry, Lorraine. “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash.” In Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analysis 1619 to the Present, edited by Joanne Grant. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1968, 447.
73. McKissack, Patricia and Fredrick L. McKissack. Young, Black, and Determined: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. New York: Holiday House, 1998.
74. Ibid., 134.
75. Lester, “Introduction,” Les Blancs, 3.
76. Hansberry, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, 283–84.
77. Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, 79.
78. “We Are of the Same Sidewalks,” Catalogue of the ACA Gallery’s Charles White exhibition, 1961, published in Freedomways 20 (Winter 1980): 198.
Abell, Joy L.. “African/American: Lorraine Hansberry’s Les Blancs and the American Civil Rights Movement.” African American Review 35, 3 (2001): 459–70.
Brown, Lloyd W. “Lorraine Hansberry as Ironist.” Journal of Black Studies 4 (March 1974): 237–47.
A Raisin in the Sun. New York: Random House, 1959; London: Methuen, 1960.
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. New York: Samuel French, 1965. In Three Negro Plays. London: Penguin: 1969.
To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, adapted by Robert Nemiroff. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, adapted by Robert Nemiroff. New York, Cherry Lane Theatre, January 2, 1969.
Les Blancs, adapted by Robert Nemiroff. New York, Longacre Theater, November 15, 1970.
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, The Musical, adapted by Robert Nemiroff, music by Ray Errol Fox. New York, Longacre Theater, January 17, 1972.
Raisin, The Musical, adapted by Robert Nemiroff, music by Judd Wolden. New York, 46th Street Theater, October 18, 1973.
———. Adapted by Robert Nemiroff, music by Judd Wolden. New York, Equity Library Theater, May 17, 1981.
A Raisin in the Sun. New York, Royale Theater, April 26, 2004.
A Raisin in the Sun, Columbia Pictures, 1961.
To Be Young Gifted and Black, adapted from Nemiroff’s play based on Hansberry’s writings by Robert M. Fresco, WNET, January 1972.
A Raisin in the Sun, PBS American Playhouse Television Production, February 1989.
Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art and the Black Revolution, selected and edited by Robert Nemiroff, Caedmon Records (TC 1352) 1972.
“The Negro in American Culture.” Cross Currents 11, 3 (Summer 1961): 205–24. Transcript of 1961 WBAI-FM radio symposium.
“A Challenge to Artists.” In Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in the United States 1797–1971, edited by Philip S. Foner. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972, 954–59.
“In Defense of the Equality of Men.” In The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. New York: Norton, 1985, 2056–68.
“Village Intellect Revealed,” New York Times, sec. 2 (October 31. 1964): 26–29.
“The Beauty of Things Black—Toward Total Liberation: Mike Wallace Interviews Lorraine Hansberry (1959), Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art and the Black Revolution,” Caedmon Cassette.
“An Author’s Reflections: Willy Loman, Walter Lee Younger and He Who Must Live.” Village Voice 4 (August 12, 1959): 7, 8.
“Genet, Mailer and the New Paternalism.” The Village Voice 1 (June 1, 1961): 10, 15.
“The American Theatre Needs Desegregating, Too.” Negro Digest 10 (June 1961): 28–33.
“A Challenge to Artists.” Freedomways 3 (Winter 1963): 33–35.
“The Black Revolution and the White Backlash” (transcript of Town Hall Forum). National Guardian (July 4, 1964): 5–9.
“The Nation Needs Your Gifts.” Negro Digest 13 (August 1964): 26–29.
“The Legacy of W. E. B. DuBois.” Freedomways 5 (Winter 1965): 19–20.
“The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism.” Black Scholar 12 (March/April 1981): 2–12.
“All the Dark and Beautiful Warriors.” Village Voice 28 (August 16, 1983): 1, 11–16, 18–19.
Kaiser, Ernest and Robert Nemiroff. “A Lorraine Hansberry Bibliography.” Freedomways 19, (Fourth Quarter 1979): 285–304.
Rich, Adrienne. “The Problem with Lorraine Hansberry.” Freedomways 19, 4 (1979): 247–55.
The Lorraine Hansberry archives are held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library system.