Lorraine Hansberry was twenty-eight when A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in March 1959, the first play by a Black woman produced there, and it won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Drawing on her family’s own legal fight against housing segregation in Chicago, the play put a working-class Black family’s aspirations at the center of the American stage. She was also a committed activist and essayist, and she died of cancer at thirty-four.
At a Glance
- Born
- 19 May 1930, Chicago, Illinois
- Died
- 12 January 1965, New York, New York
- Birth name
- Lorraine Vivian Hansberry
- Known for
- A Raisin in the Sun (1959); The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964); To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1969, posthumous)
- Fields
- Literature · Civil Rights
- Era
- Letters, Arts & Sciences
Early Life
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born in Chicago on 19 May 1930, the youngest child of Carl Augustus Hansberry, a real estate broker, and Nannie Louise Perry Hansberry, a former schoolteacher. The family was prosperous and politically engaged; visitors to the Hansberry home included figures such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes, and her uncle, William Leo Hansberry, was a historian of Africa at Howard University.
In 1937 Carl Hansberry bought a house in the Washington Park subdivision on Chicago’s South Side, a white neighborhood bound by a racially restrictive covenant. White neighbors attacked the house, and by Lorraine Hansberry’s later account a piece of concrete thrown through a window narrowly missed her. Neighbors sued to enforce the covenant, and the Illinois courts ordered the family out. The case, Hansberry v. Lee, reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which on 12 November 1940 ruled for the Hansberrys on the ground that they could not be bound by an earlier class-action judgment in which their interests had not been represented. The ruling did not strike down restrictive covenants themselves, and Hansberry later wrote bitterly of the toll the fight took on her father, who died in Mexico in 1946.
After graduating from Englewood High School, Hansberry enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1948, where she became involved in progressive politics and was drawn to the theater after seeing a production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. She left in 1950 for New York.
Life and Work
In New York Hansberry went to work for Freedom, the monthly newspaper founded by Paul Robeson, first on staff and by 1952 as an associate editor. She wrote on civil rights, colonial Africa, and women’s rights, and after she attended a peace conference abroad in 1952 the State Department revoked her passport. In 1953 she married Robert Nemiroff, a writer and music publisher; they separated in 1957 and later divorced, though they remained close collaborators until her death.
Hansberry took her title from Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem,” which asks what happens to a dream deferred. A Raisin in the Sun, about the Younger family of Chicago’s South Side — the matriarch Lena, her son Walter Lee, and her daughter Beneatha — and their struggle over how to spend a life-insurance payment and whether to move into a white neighborhood, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 11 March 1959, directed by Lloyd Richards with Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Claudia McNeil. It was the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway, and Hansberry became the youngest American and the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play. The production ran for 530 performances. Hansberry wrote the screenplay for the 1961 film version, which kept Poitier, Dee, and McNeil in their stage roles and received a special award at the Cannes Film Festival.
Hansberry used her new prominence for the movement. In May 1963 she was among the group, organized by James Baldwin, that met Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in New York to press the administration on civil rights, a meeting that ended in open disagreement. She wrote the text for The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964), a photographic book produced with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and in 1964 she told a group of young writers that it was a fine thing to be young, gifted, and Black, words that later became the title of her posthumous collection.
Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 1963, Hansberry kept writing through repeated surgeries. Her second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, about a white Greenwich Village intellectual’s retreat from and return to political commitment, opened at the Longacre Theatre on 15 October 1964.
Legacy
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window closed on 10 January 1965, and Hansberry died in New York two days later, on 12 January 1965, at thirty-four. Paul Robeson spoke at her memorial service. As her literary executor, Nemiroff assembled her writings into the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which opened off-Broadway in 1969 and inspired the Nina Simone song of the same name, and brought her unfinished drama of African decolonization, Les Blancs, to Broadway in 1970.
Scholars have since recovered dimensions of Hansberry’s life that were little known during it, including her anticolonial politics, her feminism, and her lesbian identity; in 1957 she had written letters, signed with her initials, to The Ladder, the magazine of the lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis. A Raisin in the Sun was adapted for public television in 1989 and revived on Broadway in 2004 with Phylicia Rashad and Audra McDonald, who both won Tony Awards for their performances; it remains among the most widely taught American plays. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2017.
Hansberry turned her family’s fight against housing segregation into drama, showing how private dreams and public law collide in the lives of ordinary families. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 19 May 1930 Born in Chicago, Illinois.
- 1937 Family moves into the restricted Washington Park subdivision on Chicago’s South Side.
- 12 November 1940 Supreme Court decides Hansberry v. Lee in the family’s favor.
- 1950 Moves to New York; joins the staff of Paul Robeson’s Freedom.
- 11 March 1959 A Raisin in the Sun opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway.
- 1959 Wins the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play.
- 1961 Film version, with her screenplay, is released.
- May 1963 Joins James Baldwin’s delegation to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
- 15 October 1964 The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window opens on Broadway.
- 12 January 1965 Dies of pancreatic cancer in New York at thirty-four.
Sources and Further Reading
- Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018).
- Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York: Random House, 1959).
- Lorraine Hansberry, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, adapted by Robert Nemiroff (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969).
- PBS American Masters, “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart — Timeline.” Link
- Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940), Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Link
- National Women’s Hall of Fame, “Lorraine Hansberry.” Link
Related on Black-History.com
Cite this page
- MLA
- “Lorraine Hansberry.” Black-History.com, 30 Sept. 2026, https://black-history.com/people/lorraine-hansberry/.
- APA
- Black-History.com Editors. (2026, September 30). Lorraine Hansberry. Black-History.com. https://black-history.com/people/lorraine-hansberry/
- Chicago
- Black-History.com Editors. “Lorraine Hansberry.” Black-History.com. September 30, 2026. https://black-history.com/people/lorraine-hansberry/.
By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.