Lorraine Hansberry
From Philosopedia
Hansberry, Lorraine (19 May 1930 - 12 January 1965)
A prominent African American playwright, Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first play on Broadway by a black woman. Hansberry selected the title of her play from a line in a poem by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, Or does it explode?" Sidney Poitier starred in both the play and film version. The play's central protagonist is Beneatha, an eager young woman determined to fight social convention and go to medical school. Beneatha is a "self-avowed" atheist (who gets slapped by her mother for admitting it).
Hansberry in 1959 wrote The Drinking Gourd, commissioned by the National Broadcasting Co. About the American slave trade, it was considered too hot for television and was never produced.
Her play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964), was about a Jewish intellectual. It played on Broadway while Hansberry was being hospitalized for the cancer that cut her life short at age 34.
To Be Young, Gifted, and Black was posthumously adapted from her writings and was produced off-Broadway in 1969, also appearing in book form (1970)
Her antipathy toward religious nonsense, shown in Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity (1991), is similar to that of other secularists and humanists.
A bisexual who in 1953 had married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish writer of the hit song, "Cindy, Oh Cindy", she connected homophobia and antifeminism, according to the University of Michigan’s Dorothy H. Lee, “calling for analyses of ethical questions implicit in the social and moral inequities produced by patriarchal culture.” In The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964), she boldly addressed the artistic and sexual issues of a white homosexual artist.
Immune to orthodoxy, whether it came from whites or blacks, Hansberry confronted then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy about racism as easily as she addressed issues of sexism and homophobia in the black community.
{The Advocate, 19 August 1997}
