Lorraine Hansberry born - May 19, 1930

On this day in 1930, playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Stay in History Class. It's a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello, Hello, everyone, Welcome to this Day in
History class, where we bring you a new tidbit from
history every day. Today is May nineteenth, nineteen. The day

(00:25):
was May nineteenth, nineteen thirty. Lorraine Vivian Handsbury was born
at Provident Hospital in Chicago to Nanny Perry Handsbury and
Carl Augustus Handsberry. Over the course of her life, Lorraine
would write several plays, participate in political protests, and become
the first black playwright and youngest American to win a

(00:47):
New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Lorraine was the youngest
of four children. Her mother was a teacher and Ward
committee woman, and her father worked in real estate. Her uncle,
William Leo Handsbury, was a professor of African history at
Howard University. Lorraine went to kindergarten in Chicago's South Side,

(01:08):
where she said, quote, the kids beat me up, and
I think it was from that moment I became a rebel.
As a child, Lorraine was around artist and activists like
Paul Robinson, Walter White, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B.
Du Bois, who visited her family. In eight, the family

(01:29):
bought a house on the South side of Chicago in
an all white neighborhood. The white residents there attempted to
impose a restrictive covenant that barred the hands Buries from
living there, but her family challenged Chicago's discriminatory real estate
practices in a test case for integrated housing, and they
emerged victorious in the nineteen forty u. S. Supreme Court

(01:50):
decision and Handsbury versus Lee. Lorraine's father's activism and involvement
with the Inn Double a c P. Had a huge
impact on her active bis um, and her uncle's influence
likely helped shape her views on the Black liberation movement.
She graduated from Inglewood High School in Chicago in nineteen
forty eight, and then went to the University of Wisconsin

(02:12):
for two years, where she worked to integrate her dorm.
After that, she briefly attended the Art Institute of Chicago
to study painting, but she wanted to pursue writing in theater,
so after a summer of studying art at Roosevelt University,
she moved to New York and began attending the New
School for Social Research. While she was there, she wrote

(02:33):
articles for the Young Progressives of America magazine and became
a reporter for Paul Robeson's radical monthly magazine Freedom. She
covered the civil rights movement other freedom movements around the world,
and she was active in the fight for black civil rights.
By nineteen fifty three, she was an editor at the magazine,
but that same year she resigned from her position at

(02:55):
Freedom to further pursue playwriting and married Robert Nimrov, a
writer and graduate student at New York University. In nineteen
fifty seven, Lorraine completed the manuscript for A Raisin in
the Sun, a play about a black family living in
south Side Chicago in the nineteen fifties, and in March
nineteen fifty nine, the play opened on Broadway, making Handsbury

(03:19):
the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway.
The play ran for five hundred and thirty performances and
put actor Sidney Poittier in the spotlight. The play also
got Handsbury national recognition, and she won the New York
Drama Critics Circle Award for it. Lorraine was praised for
the plays commentary on race and Black American culture, but

(03:41):
when NBC commissioned her to write a TV drama about
slavery for a commemoration of the Civil War. Her resulting work,
The Drinking Gourd, was deemed too controversial and discontinued. Handsbury
also wrote other plays, including The Sign and Sidney, Bruce,
Deean's Window, and Le Blanc, and She continued her work

(04:01):
in the civil rights movement, raising funds for the Student
Non Violent Coordinating Committee and writing the text for a
snake photo book called The Movement Documentary of a Struggle
for Equality. Handsbury took part in a meeting with Attorney
General Robert Kennedy to get him to help protect civil
rights workers in the South. She also supported the American

(04:23):
lesbian liberation movement, writing about radical feminism, misogyny, and homophobia.
In nineteen sixty three, Handsbury was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
The next year, she divorced her husband. She died in
nineteen sixty five at thirty four years old. More than
six hundred people attended her funeral in Harlem that January.

(04:45):
Lorraine was working on several projects that remained unfinished at
the time of her death, including an epic opera about
Toussaint l'overture and an autobiographical novel called All the Dark
and Beautiful Warriors. I'm each of Coach and hopefully you
know a little more about history today than you did yesterday.
If you have any burning questions or comments to tell us,

(05:08):
you can find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at
t D i HC Podcast. Thank you for joining me today.
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(05:31):
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