7 Things You Should Know About Lorraine Hansberry

By the time she was 34, Lorraine Hansberry had already penned two Broadway plays—Raisin in the Sun (1959) and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). She appeared set for a thriving and prosperous career, but tragically, her life was cut short by cancer on January 12, 1965. Despite this, Hansberry’s influence endures. As Martin Luther King Jr. expressed in a message sent to her memorial, she remains “an inspiration to generations yet unborn.” Here are seven essential facts about the acclaimed writer and civil rights advocate.

1. Lorraine Hansberry’s family played a crucial role in the landmark 1940 case Hansberry v. Lee.

When Lorraine was 7 years old, her father Carl purchased a house in Chicago’s Washington Park neighborhood, which had a restrictive covenant barring Black people from owning property. Some local residents, including Anna M. Lee, took legal action to evict the Hansberry family. Although the courts initially sided with Lee, Carl and his wife Nannie appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, where they were represented by Earl B. Dickerson. The Court ultimately reversed the decision—though, as the Library of Congress notes, this ruling did not declare discriminatory covenants unconstitutional or illegal, but instead determined that the previous courts had not properly considered the interests of the parties in Hansberry in their earlier decision.

While restrictive covenants persisted for some time after the Hansberry case, it remains significant because it set the stage for the 1948 ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer, which finally ended racially restrictive covenants by declaring them a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Today, the Hansberry family home is a Chicago landmark, and the experience would later inspire Hansberry’s iconic play, A Raisin in the Sun.

2. Hansberry pursued art studies. 

Before diving into her career as a playwright, Hansberry studied art at three different institutions: the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she enrolled in art classes in 1948 but left before completing her degree; the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, where she attended a painting-focused workshop in 1949; and Roosevelt University in Chicago, where she continued her art studies in 1950. Even as she shifted her focus to writing, Hansberry continued to create art in her free time; here’s a self-portrait from 1952.

3. She began writing her first dramatic works while working for the Black newspaper Freedom. 

A pivotal moment in Hansberry’s life and career came when she joined Freedom, a Black newspaper founded by Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham, in 1951. Her contributions included an article on the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a group of Black women advocating for their rights, and a report on the case of Willie McGee, a Black man who was executed in a “legal lynching” after being convicted of raping a white woman in Mississippi. It was also during this time that Hansberry began writing dramatic works, including a collaboration with fellow Freedom writer Alice Childress: a pageant that celebrated Black history. The pageant was performed on February 29, 1952, at Harlem’s Golden Gate Ballroom, featuring a cast including Childress, Robeson, Sidney Poitier, and Beulah Richardson, with Harry Belafonte singing at the event.

4. Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun became the first Broadway production written by a Black woman. 

In 1959, Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun debuted on Broadway, making history as the first play written by a Black woman to be performed there. The title is drawn from the opening lines of Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” which contemplates the fate of a “dream deferred”: “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”

The play was met with critical and commercial success, running for 19 months on Broadway. Author James Baldwin later remarked, “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.” Two years later, A Raisin in the Sun was adapted into a film, for which Hansberry also wrote the screenplay. The play remains a landmark work and continues to be staged worldwide.

5. She wrote letters to The Ladder magazine about LGBT issues.

Hansberry was gay, though she rarely spoke openly about her sexuality during her lifetime. While she discussed it privately with some, according to The New Yorker, “it was never a public matter in her lifetime”—a time when homosexuality was illegal in New York. “She wasn’t out in the traditional sense,” Hansberry’s biographer Imani Perry told NPR in 2018. “It would have been very difficult and dangerous for her to be out in multiple ways.” After her separation from her husband, theater producer Robert Nemiroff, in 1957, Hansberry began dating women. The couple, married in 1953, divorced in 1962 but remained close friends until her passing.

Hansberry wrote letters (signed only with her initials) to The Ladder, the first national lesbian publication in the United States. In one letter, she shared the internal struggle she faced as a lesbian married to a man. After Hansberry’s death, Nemiroff donated her personal papers to the New York Public Library, but imposed a restriction on access to those discussing her sexuality; these documents were not made public until 2013.

6. Hansberry challenged Robert F. Kennedy to make a moral commitment to civil rights.

Hansberry was deeply dedicated to the civil rights movement. She once wrote that “one cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and react to the miseries which afflict this world.” On May 24, 1963, she attended the “Baldwin-Kennedy meeting,” where Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy met with James Baldwin and other prominent civil rights leaders. At this meeting, Hansberry urged Kennedy to make a “moral commitment” to their cause.

Witnesses in the room reported that Kennedy didn’t respond positively at the moment, but he did eventually persuade his brother, President John F. Kennedy, to deliver a significant address on civil rights on June 11, 1963—just a few weeks after their meeting. In that speech, the President declared, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue … as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” He also announced that he would be urging Congress to pass legislation ensuring “all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public—hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.” Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was eventually signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in July 1964.

7. Hansberry is credited with coining the phrase to be young, gifted and Black. 

By 1964, Hansberry’s health had severely declined. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, though her diagnosis was kept from her by Nemiroff and her doctors, who believed it would be better if she didn’t know. Despite being terminally ill, Hansberry left the hospital on May 1, 1964, to give a speech to the winners of a creative writing competition for young people—and it was during this speech that she coined one of the phrases most closely associated with her.

“I wanted to be able to come here and speak with you on this occasion because you are young, gifted, and Black,” she said. “I, for one, can think of no more dynamic combination that a person might be. … And that is why I say to you that, though it be a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic—to be young, gifted, and Black.” After her death (which occurred the same day Sidney Brustein closed), a play bearing this name was created from Hansberry’s writings, and Nina Simone, a close friend of Hansberry’s, also composed a song (above) using the phrase as a tribute to the playwright.