Wiki lorraine hansberry biography video

(1930-1965)

Who Was Lorraine Hansberry?

Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, a play about a struggling Black family, which opened on Broadway to great success.

Hansberry was the first Black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award. Throughout her life she was heavily involved in civil rights. She died at 34 of pancreatic cancer.

Early Life

The granddaughter of a freed enslaved person, and the youngest by seven years of four children, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry 3rd was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois.

Wiki lorraine hansberry biography video

Hansberry’s father was a successful real estate broker, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Her parents contributed large sums of money to the NAACP and the Urban League. In 1938, Hansberry's family moved to a white neighborhood and was violently attacked by neighbors.

They refused to move until a court ordered them to do so, and the case made it to the Supreme Court as Hansberry v. Lee, ruling restri