28/06/2023
Lorraine Hansberry, author of the acclaimed play, "A Raisin in the Sun," and the first African American woman to write a play performed on Broadway, was born on this day in 1930. Her famous work was inspired by her family's real-life battle against housing segregation in Chicago. When the Hansberry family moved to Chicago's Washington Park neighborhood in 1938, many neighbors challenged their move, arguing that it violated a restrictive covenant that prohibited African Americans from buying houses in the community. Although a lower court ordered the family to move, the case eventually made it to the U.S. Supreme Court and, in the case of Hansberry vs. Lee, such restrictive covenants were declared illegal.
Hansberry's play, "Raisin in the Sun," which examines both racism and sexism, takes its name from the beginning of Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem": "What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore -- and then run?" She continued writing until her death in 1965 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. After Hansberry's death, Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that "Her creative ability and her profound grasp of the deep social issues confronting the world today will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn."
