We’re nearing the end of Black History Month, and with it, the end of this iteration of “Black History, Uncensored,” our series focused on Black writers targeted by conservative bans.
From the outset, I didn’t want to confine this series to book authors, because doing so would ignore Black creators whose work didn’t quite fit that form. Creators like Lorraine Hansberry, the famed playwright behind “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Hansberry strayed from her middle-class parents’ center-right leanings as a teenager and left Chicago for New York City, where she pursued her writing career and activism. “A Raisin in the Sun” debuted in 1959, making her the first Black woman to have a show produced on Broadway. The play was somewhat autobiographical for Hansberry, telling the story of a Black family who struggles to gain a toehold in middle-class America.
As Blair McClendon wrote for The New Yorker in January 2022:
Hansberry was not raised to be a radical. She was born in Chicago in 1930, the child of an illustrious family that was well regarded in business and academic circles. Lorraine’s father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a real-estate speculator and a proud race man. When Lorraine was seven years old, the family bought a house in a mostly white neighborhood. Faced with eviction by the local property owners association, Carl fought against racially restrictive housing covenants in court.
And Carl Hansberry won.
But as we’ll see in Monday’s featured work, the limitations of that victory contributed to Hansberry’s political radicalism.
“The Black Revolution and the White Backlash,” Hansberry’s speech at a 1964 town hall, focused on race relations, in which she described how her father’s inability to secure full citizenship rights in spite of his legal wins led her to embrace more radical thinking about civil rights activism. (You can listen to her speech here.)
Speaking of her father, she said:
[H]e moved his family into a restricted area where no…
Read the full article here
