- Born
- 19 May 1930Chicago, USA
- Died
- 12 January 1965New York City, USA · aged 34
Lorraine Hansberry
The first Black woman to have a play on Broadway wrote anonymous letters to a lesbian magazine about homophobia and feminism.
Lorraine Hansberry grew up in Chicago. When she was eight, her family moved into a white neighbourhood and faced violent hostility; her father fought the restrictive housing covenants all the way to the US Supreme Court and won in 1940.
In New York she worked for Paul Robeson’s newspaper “Freedom” and was active in the civil rights movement. In 1959 her play “A Raisin in the Sun”, about a Black family in Chicago who want to buy a house in a white neighbourhood, opened on Broadway – the first play by a Black woman to be performed there. She was the youngest playwright and the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
In 1953 she married the songwriter Robert Nemiroff; they separated and later quietly divorced. In 1957 she wrote letters to “The Ladder”, the magazine of the lesbian organisation Daughters of Bilitis, signed only with her initials, in which she wrote about homophobia and the oppression of women. Her diaries, later made public, show that she identified as a lesbian.
She died of cancer in New York in 1965, aged only 34. Her writings were collected after her death under the title “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”.