Lorraine Hansberry Essay -- essays research papers

Her first play, A Raisin In the Sun, is based on her childhood experiences of desegregating a white neighborhood. It won the New York Drama Critic's Circle Award as Best Play of the Year. She was the youngest American, the fifth woman and the first black to win the award. Her success opened the floodgates for a generation of modern black actors and writers who were influenced and encouraged by her writing. Hansberry was born in 1930, the youngest of four children of Carl and Nannie Hansberry, a respected and successful black family in Chicago, Illinois. Nannie was the college educated daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and Carl was a successful real estate businessman, an inventor and a politician who ran for congress in 1940. Both parents were activists challenging discriminating Jim Crow Laws. Because of their stature in the black community such important black leaders as Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Langston Hughes frequented the Hansberry home as Lorraine was growing up. Although they could afford good private schools, Lorraine was educated in the segregated public schools as her family worked within the system to change the laws governing segregation. After high school Hansberry briefly attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison before moving to New York for "an education of another kind." She married Robert Nemiroff, a white Jewish intellectual who she met on a picket line protesting the exclusion of black athletes from universi...