For a while, the name Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) had faded from the mainstream. But in her brief life, she made a major mark on African American culture, particularly in theater, most notably through her award-winning 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun. A recent resurgence of interest in Hansberry seeks to acknowledge that legacy. Earlier this year, PBS’s American Masters series aired a new documentary, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, and now a new biography brings many details of her life to new audiences.
Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry (release date September 18) is a work of scholarship and love. “I think she has something to teach us,” Perry writes in the introduction. “The portrait here is, then, as much homage to her as it is gift to myself, and to you. That we might see the stuff of our lives in hers. So much has yet to be done and she can help us do it.”
Perry is the Hughes-Rogers professor of African American Studies and a faculty associate in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. An energetic writer, she has three books coming out this year. May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem was published in February. Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation, which takes on patriarchy in the digital age, will be published in September, the same month as her biography of Hansberry.
It is, Perry notes as she introduces the book, “not a traditional biography.”
“In my hands,” she writes, “the narrative comes from the sketches, snatches, and masterpieces she left behind; the scrawled-upon pages, published plays, and memories: her own and others from people who witnessed and marveled at, and even some of those who resented, her genius.”
Besides reading Hansberry’s writing and personal papers, most of which are collected at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Perry also conducted her own interviews and research, and visited some of the landmarks of Hansberry’s life, including her grave.
Hansberry grew up on Chicago’s South Side. Her father was an entrepreneur who subdivided older housing stock to create apartments for Chicago’s growing African American population at a time when restrictive real estate laws kept blacks out of many of the city’s neighborhoods.
“Lorraine, though a bookish and interior child,” writes Perry, “was always part of the throng of children playing on those wooden back porches of Chicago apartment buildings and on the burning concrete of Chicago blocks.” The experience of growing up black in the city shaped her art and her life as an activist.
“Before writing A Raisin in the Sun,” Perry relates, “Lorraine habitually worked through her ideas, memories, politics, and passions through vividly imagined fictional scenes. They are a key to revealing her interior life.”
Perry takes us into that interior life with a deft hand and a richness of language that makes every page of this book a pleasure to read.
Perry takes us into that interior life with a deft hand and a richness of language that makes every page of this book a pleasure to read. She often steps out of the role of biographer and speaks directly to the reader, sharing stories drawn from her own experience, pointing out that “all biography is autobiography, at least in part.”
Lorraine Hansberry came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1948, where she became the first black student to integrate her women’s dormitory. It was during her time in Wisconsin that she became an artist and a political activist.
“In Lorraine’s serious and reflective moments she was contemplating so many things,” Perry writes. “Among her thoughts were questions about race and racism, war, a general concern about the state of the world, and a desire to do something about it all. It was in college that her sense that art might enable her to do something meaningful for the world emerged.”
While at the University of Wisconsin, Hansberry became active in the Progressive Party and in the 1948 Presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. “Like many other young activist African Americans, Lorraine was drawn to Wallace because he had much stronger positions than Truman in support of civil rights and the rights of working people and the colonized world,” Perry explains. “It was unsurprising that a young, critically thinking, and burgeoning intellectual and artist like Lorraine would support Wallace.”
Hansberry left Wisconsin and moved to New York, where she continued her political activism and writing, initially with the Progressive Party, but moving even farther left as the rest of the country shifted right with the rampant anti-communism of the 1950s.
“For Lorraine, however, American radicalism was both a passion and a commitment. It was, in fact, a requirement for human decency,” Perry explains. “Lorraine was part of a group of U.S.-based artists and intellectuals who, though often in community with their less radical counterparts, were unflinching in their social critique.”
In New York, Hansberry continued to mature as a writer. In the fall of 1950, she had her first poem published in the left periodical Masses & Mainstream. It was about the Chicago apartment in which she grew up. “Lorraine wanted to present the lives of her father’s residents, people oppressed and exploited, offset against the national lies of liberty and democracy,” chronicles Perry. “She was political. But she was also an aesthete. Her words were chosen with care, for their sound and their rhythm. She had begun to step into herself.”
A major breakthrough for Hansberry was the Broadway production in 1959 of her play about that same South Side community, which takes its name from a line in a poem by Langston Hughes. A Raisin in the Sun premiered in March of that year. “It was a very big deal,” notes Perry. “Broadway audiences had never before seen the work of a Black playwright and director, featuring a Black cast with no singing, dancing, or slapstick and a clear social message.”
Hansberry was a dedicated and serious activist-artist, but she also had a great spirit of fun and a love of people and friends. “That combination of play and seriousness was at the core of her personality,” Perry writes.
In June 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, a fellow left activist. The day before their wedding, the couple participated in a protest of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the first U.S. civilians killed for being spies. Hansberry and “Bobby,” as she called him, would divorce in 1962, but, as Perry notes, “He was a friend until her death, a caretaker, one who encouraged and facilitated her writing, and after her death the one who ensured her legacy.”
Hansberry went on to explore her sexuality in new ways. “I believe that if we take her work seriously, we must talk about sexuality,” writes Perry, stepping out of the book to speak to her audience. “Though her romantic relationships remain, for me, somewhat opaque, it is unquestionable that her desire for women and her love of women was meaningful as part of her politics, her intellectual life, and her aesthetics, as well as her spirit.”
Lorraine Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, at age thirty-four. Today, there is a park named after her and historic designations of her home in Chicago, and a plaque in New York City. An elementary school in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans also bore her name, but it was closed after Hurricane Katrina, like so many of that city’s public schools.
“I wonder, as she takes her place in the great beyond,” Izzy Rowe wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier in a tribute after Hansberry’s death, “was she supposed to say it all, or just put the lights on so that someone else might now step from the wings and continue the dialogue?” This wonderful biography of the radical Lorraine Hansberry certainly helps brighten some of that light.
Sidebar:
Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing, published early this year, is a collection of black writers writing about writing. It includes twenty-five writers whose work spans twenty-five decades, from Frederick Douglass in 1845 to Barack Obama in 2017. In between are the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, and Alice Walker. (The section from Obama is taken from an interview with the President that appeared in The New York Times just days before his successor was inaugurated. Like much else, it makes the reader long for a President who spoke in complete sentences and actually read books.)
While Black Ink does not include anything by Lorraine Hansberry, it does showcase some of her contemporaries, including Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), whose 1930s manuscript Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” was just posthumously released in May with a new foreword by Walker. It also includes the slightly younger Walter Dean Myers (1937-2014), best known for his children’s and young adult books, including biographies of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Muhammad Ali.
Editor Stephanie Stokes Oliver explains, “Collectively, the pieces here serve as a testament to the will, the struggle, and the difference that learning to read and then taking pen to paper, and now fingers to computer, has made in American history.”
Many of the writers in this collection seek to document the world they live in. As Hurston says in her essay, “What I wanted to tell was the story about a man, and from what I had read and heard, Negroes were supposed to write about the Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly sick of the subject. My interest lies in what makes a man or a woman do such-and-so, regardless of his color.”
Myers, as a children’s writer, wants his young, black, inner-city readers to see themselves in his stories, to “make them feel as if they are a part of America’s dream.”
“I am a writer,” he explains, “but I also see myself as something of a landscape artist. I paint pictures of scenes for inner-city youth that are familiar . . . the recognition of themselves in the story, a validation of their existence as human beings, an acknowledgement of their value by someone who understands who they are.” ω