Introduction

This book is about Lorraine Hansberry, an American playwright whose play A Raisin in the Sun competes with Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman for the honor of the most popular work of mid-twentieth-century American theater. No other play from that era is more widely anthologized, read, or performed than Hansberry’s most famous work, written when she was just twenty-nine.

Until the curtain rose on A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, “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,” James Baldwin wrote. During the decade that followed, more than six hundred black theater companies opened their doors, providing venues for works by Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Alice Childress, Ntozake Shange, and August Wilson—the high-water mark of twentieth-century African American drama. Had Hansberry not died at thirty-four in 1965, today she would have been an elder spokesperson in the LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter movements. Her ability to articulate and dramatize human rights would have brought her to the forefront of current thought and literature.

This biography is an attempt to situate Lorraine Hansberry with her contemporaries—midcentury American writers, artists, and activists. My approach to writing a life is to focus on what sets a person apart from others, who influenced them, and which events became turning points in their lives. Fortunately, Hansberry had a gift, or maybe an instinct, for engaging with the leading black American playwrights, novelists, activists, and cultural leaders of her day. The richness of her private correspondence, her notes to herself, and drafts of unpublished works—curated for twenty-five years by her former husband, Robert Nemiroff—open a window onto how Hansberry saw the world. To show her development as an artist, I rely on her friendships, romances, ambition, and emotional struggles. She cultivated multidimensionality in her personal and professional life, which led to new directions in her work and love affairs.

A side of her that will be new to readers is her complicated loyalty to her family. She was raised upper-middle class, and despite being an anticapitalist, she enjoyed the cultural and material advantages of an upbringing among the black elite. She stood by her family as they fought to maintain a lifestyle that was built on a family dynasty of black free enterprise on Chicago’s South Side.

Also presented here for the first time is a domestic portrait of Hansberry and Nemiroff, and of their creative partnership. The Nemiroffs of Greenwich Village is an unusual story.

A Note about Usage: Lorraine Hansberry was “not interested in capitalizing the first letters of the expression ‘black race,’” she said in 1959, “any more than I could imagine that anyone should wish to suddenly start writing ‘White Race.’” The reason was “American Negroes take the view that we are a specific and not a generality.” I accede to her preference and lowercase black and white throughout the book and rely on Negro now and then. “‘Negro’ is quite as accurate, quite as old and quite as definite as any name of any great group of people,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois.

1

Infant of the Spring

I went to Chicago as a migrant from Mississippi. And there in that great iron city, that impersonal, mechanical city, amid the steam, the smoke, the snowy winds, the blistering sun; there in that self-conscious city, that city so deadly dramatic and stimulating, we caught whispers of meanings that life could have …

—Richard Wright, Black Metropolis, Introduction

It was a warm evening for early February in Philadelphia in 1959, and the excited crowd waiting in the alley beside the Walnut Street Theatre was large. At last, the stage door opened, and an elegantly dressed young woman stepped out to a round of applause and cries of “Bravo!”

Laughing, Lorraine Hansberry turned to James Baldwin and asked him for a pen—a playwright without a pen! “It only happens once!” she said happily. He dipped into his suit jacket to find one, delighted by her “marvelous laugh,” because it was loud and rowdy, in contrast to her refined voice and sophisticated dress. “I loved her,” he said; “she was my sister and my comrade.” She handed him her pocketbook while she reached out to the eager hands waving programs of A Raisin in the Sun for her autograph.

Baldwin was delighted with the play, impressed with the black ensemble, and surprised that half of the audience was black. But he understood why. It was because “black people recognized that house and all the people in it”—that house in Chicago’s South Side ghetto, where the Younger family lives in a tenement too small for their dreams.1 In the final scene, the mother, Lena Younger, takes a last look around at the shabby rooms she’s lived in for years, holding in her hand a single potted flower from the kitchen windowsill. And then she leaves and closes the door behind her, to begin a better life. The Youngers wanted out of the ghetto like millions of other black Americans. The audience got to their feet, cheered, and shouted for the author. Some stayed in their seats and cried. A woman who’d never been to a play before had bought a ticket because, she told an usher, “The word’s going around my neighborhood that there’s something here that has to do with me.”2 Lorraine Hansberry was a witness to the truth, and the people crowding around her now assuredly understood this and wanted to tell her—this young woman not yet thirty who knew what was in their hearts.

On the sidewalk in front of the theater, people were lingering, discussing the play. A man coming out wove between them and then continued on his way down the street. During the performance, he’d been sitting quietly listening and taking notes. He was thinking about what he’d seen, what it meant, and what he would say in his report about A Raisin in the Sun and its playwright for the New York office of the FBI.

* * *

The day Lorraine Hansberry was born, May 19, 1930, started out chilly, with the sun poking through shimmering rain. “I was, being May-born,” she wrote, “literally an ‘infant of the spring.’”3 She was delivered at Provident Hospital, on the corner of Thirty-Sixth and Dearborn on Chicago’s South Side. Provident was one of the few hospitals in the city where black physicians, refused visiting privileges at white-controlled hospitals, could attend to Negro women.4 Lorraine’s brothers and sister—Carl Jr., nearly ten; Perry, almost nine; and Mamie, almost seven—had been born at Fort Dearborn Hospital and Training School for Colored Nurses. The year Carl was born, 1920, a bomb set by racists exploded in the hallway of the nurses’ residence, injuring three.

On her birth certificate, Lorraine’s first name is misspelled “Loraine” and her middle name, “Vivian,” is omitted. Her gender is noted, but there’s no space for her race or color.5 Her father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, and her mother, Nannie Louise Hansberry, are identified as “Negro.” But someone has drawn a line through “Negro” and written “B” after her father’s name, and “Bl,” for “Black,” after her mother’s. Probably her father made the correction; he would have had the authority to do so.

The Hansberrys had accrued quite a bit of influence by the time Lorraine was born. Her father was a real estate speculator, but he preferred to be identified on the form as a “U.S. Deputy Marshal.” It was a political patronage job, one of many handed out by Lorraine’s mother, a Republican Ward committeewoman, a powerful position for a woman in those days. Carl found that having the silver star badge agreed with him. Leaving the Chicago Federal Building one morning, for instance, he flashed it at a mounted white police officer who was writing him a ticket for double-parking. He demanded the cop get down from his horse and apologize for interfering with official business, which he did.

Copyright © 2022 by Charles J. Shields