Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was 29 years old when "A Raisin in the Sun" opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959. She had written and completed it two years earlier. The opening made her the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Hansberry). She drew on her own family's experience. Born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, she grew up in a household that fought housing discrimination: her father bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision in 1938, and the dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940) (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Hansberry). The play's title comes from Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem." The original production was directed by Lloyd Richards, the first Black director of a Broadway show, and starred Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Claudia McNeil, and Louis Gossett (source: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/march-11/a-raisin-in-the-sun-debuts-broadway). Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play, becoming the first Black American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to receive it (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Hansberry). She kept working as a writer and a participant in the movement. On May 24, 1963, she joined James Baldwin's group in their meeting with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. On May 1, 1964, she spoke to young writers in an address she titled "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black" (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorraine_Hansberry). She died of pancreatic cancer on January 12, 1965, at age 34.