a raisin in the sun play by lorraine hansberry

The play opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, and was a great success, having a run of 530 performances. Hansberry wrote The Crystal Stair, a play about a struggling Black family in Chicago, which was later renamed A Raisin in the Sun, a line from a Langston Hughes poem. Her lesbian identity was exposed in the articles, but she wrote under her initials, L.H., for fear of discrimination. In 1957, she joined the Daughters of Bilitis and contributed letters to their magazine, The Ladder, about feminism and homophobia. By 1956, Hansberry quit her jobs and committed her time to writing. She also worked part-time as a waitress and cashier, and wrote in her spare time. In New York, Hansberry attended the New School for Social Research and then worked for Paul Robeson’s progressive Black newspaper, Freedom, as a writer and associate editor from 1950 to 1953. While at school, she changed her major from painting to writing, and after two years decided to drop out and move to New York City. Hansberry broke her family’s tradition of enrolling in Southern Black colleges and instead attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Lee, ruling restrictive covenants illegal. They refused to move until a court ordered them to do so, and the case made it to the Supreme Court as Hansberry v. In 1938, Hansberry's family moved to a white neighborhood and was violently attacked by neighbors. Her parents contributed large sums of money to the NAACP and the Urban League. Hansberry’s father was a successful real estate broker, and her mother was a schoolteacher. The granddaughter of a freed enslaved person, and the youngest by seven years of four children, Lorraine Vivian Hansberry 3rd was born on May 19, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois. Throughout her life she was heavily involved in civil rights. Hansberry was the first Black playwright and the youngest American to win a New York Critics’ Circle award. Lorraine Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun, a play about a struggling Black family, which opened on Broadway to great success.

A raisin in the sun play by lorraine hansberry