Strong Rooted Volume I: Issue 1-Lorraine Hansberry April 27, 2017 (Republished)
We must know where we come from in order to get to where we want to go. Never forget your roots.
Lorraine Hansberry was the granddaughter of a freed slave and the daughter of a real estate broker father and schoolteacher mother. Hansberry’s family was known for a case that made it to the supreme court that ruled restrictive covenants illegal. Hansberry attended two years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and then moved on to New York City to work as a writer for Paul Robeson’s newspaper, Freedom. Hansberry was openly gay, but due to fear of discrimination, she only wrote using her initials when she penned articles for the Daughters of Bilitis’s magazine called The Ladder.
Hansberry loved to write and quit her job to write full-time. Quitting would pay off, and Hansberry would become the first African American woman to produce a play on Broadway and the first black woman playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics Circle Award for her play the Crystal Stair, which we know as A Raisin in the Sun.
Hansberry would marry and divorce, become a Civil Rights activist, and a name for the literary history books that will never fade. Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930, and died on January 12, 1965, from pancreatic cancer, leaving many infamous friends like James Baldwin and Lena Horne, to name a few.
“I am dripping melanin and honey. I am Black without apology”-Upile Chisala.
References: Lorraine Hansberry Speaks! ‘The Black Revolution and the White Backlash’. (2015, May 19). Retrieved January 05, 2021, from https://youtu.be/wqxjc7PULJ8
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