CHICAGO — I’ve been reading about Lorraine Hansberry. After a long time of not reading very much at all about Lorraine Hansberry. There just wasn’t that much out there about
CHICAGO — I’ve been reading about Lorraine Hansberry. After a long time of not reading very much at all about Lorraine Hansberry. There just wasn’t that much out there about
Until about five years ago, the Chicago author of “A Raisin in the Sun” was a literary question mark whose life and output appeared to begin and end with a single play.
The Brief, Brilliant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
The playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1959.Credit.David Attie/Getty Images
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April 14, 2021
The curtain rises on a dim, drab room. An alarm sounds, and a woman wakes. She tries to rouse her sleeping child and husband, calling out: “Get up!”
It is the opening scene and the injunction of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the story of a Black family living on the South Side of Chicago. “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” her friend James Baldwin would later recall. It was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. When “Raisin” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, Hansberry at 29 became the youngest American and the first Black recipient.
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The First Black Woman To Write a Broadway Play
“Her creative ability…will remain an inspiration to generations yet unborn.”
Oh So now it’s life. Money is life. Once upon a time freedom used to be life now it’s money. I guess the world really do change… Mama in A Raisin in the Sun
As a special education English teacher in Baltimore City, I’ve taught more than ten books to my students. Some of the books did not make my students engaged, although I’ve credited that disinterest more to how I taught them. This time, in the time of a pandemic and virtual learning, it’s different. And I credit that to the play I’m teaching Lorraine Hansberry’s