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#OTDIH Lorraine Hansberry passed away (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965).
A playwright, author & activist, she was the first Black woman author to have a play performed on Broadway.
: David Attie / Getty Images
A playwright, author & activist, she was the first Black woman author to have a play performed on Broadway.
: David Attie / Getty Images
“Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago.”
“The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?"
“At the age of 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.”
“After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois.”
“Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggle for liberation and their impact on the world. She died of cancer at the age of 34. Hansberry inspired the song by Nina Simone entitled "To Be Young, Gifted and Black".”
“Obviously, the most oppressed group of any oppressed group will be its women, who are twice oppressed. So I imagine that they react accordingly: as oppression makes people more militant, women become twice militant, because they are twice oppressed.”
— Lorraine Hansberry
— Lorraine Hansberry
: Credit: Gin Briggs/Lorraine Hansberry Properties Trust.Source: https://www.thirteen.org/blog-post/lorraine-hansberry-a-first-among-women/
For more information about the life and activism of Lorraine Hansberry, please read Imani Perry’s ( @imaniperry) spectacular book, “Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry.”
