Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry (1930 - 1965)

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was a Black Lesbian playwright and writer. She was the first female author to have a play performed on Broadway.

Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. At age 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in 1940 their case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court.  Hansberry v. Lee. Determining that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits a judgment in a class action from binding an individual whose interests were not adequality represented in the class action.

After moving to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry also wrote about being a lesbian and the oppression of gay people. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34 during the Broadway run of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window in 1965. Hansberry inspired the Nina Simone song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", whose title line came from Hansberry's autobiographical play.