Background
Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate broker and Nannie Louise (born Perry), a driving school teacher and ward committeewoman.
Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate broker and Nannie Louise (born Perry), a driving school teacher and ward committeewoman.
A Raisin in the Sun (1959), A Raisin in the Sun (film), screenplay (1961), A Raisin in the Sun (TV film), produced (2008), On Summer (Essay) (19??),The Drinking Gourd (1960),The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964), The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1965), To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969), Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays / by Lorraine Hansberry Edited by Robert Nemiroff (1994)
Hansberry was a child of the civil rights movement—her parents fought and won a long legal battle against housing segregation in Chicago, which inspired her story for A Raisin in the Sun. Later, as a young woman, she abandoned her studies at the University of Wisconsin and moved to New York City in 1950, where she took up work on Paul Robeson’s political journal Freedom.
Hansberry contributed to the understanding of abortion, discrimination, and Africa. She joined the Daughters of Bilitis and contributed letters to their magazine, The Ladder, in 1957 that addressed feminism and homophobia. Her lesbian identity was exposed in the articles she wrote for the magazine, but she wrote under the initials L.H. for fear of discrimination against a black lesbian.