Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was a playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?".
At the age of 29, Lorraine Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. This made her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. In 1938, her father bought a house in the Washington Park Subdivision of the South Side of Chicago, incurring the wrath of their white neighbours. The latter's legal efforts to force the Hansberry family out culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940). Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant, and eventually provoking the 1940 Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.
Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940), is a famous case now usually known in civil procedure for teaching that res judicata may not bind a subsequent plaintiff who had no opportunity to be represented in the earlier civil action. The facts of the case dealt with a racially restrictive covenant that barred African Americans from purchasing or leasing land in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. The United States Supreme Court ruled that since some of the neighborhood landowners (46%) comprising the class of the prior lawsuit did not support the restrictive covenant, the previous decision that the covenant was valid could not apply to all members of that class. In other words, it was erroneous to allow the 54% of neighborhood landowners who had supported the restrictive covenant to represent the interests of the 46% who were against it. Therefore, the Supreme Court held that the restrictive covenant could be contested in court again, even though some of the parties involved may have been included in the prior class of neighborhood landowner. Later, the type of real property restriction, racially restrictive covenants, was held by Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948), to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment and were therefore legally unenforceable state action, as the private plaintiffs seeking to enforce such a covenant were invoking the machinery of the state.
Hansberry decided in 1950 to leave Madison and pursue her career as a writer in New York City, where she attended The New School. She moved to Harlem in 1951 and became involved in activist struggles such as the fight against evictions. Written and completed in 1957, A Raisin in the Sun, opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on March 11, 1959, becoming the first play by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. Hansberry wrote this play out of her experiences and wanted her the audience, which were mostly 'rich' white people, to understand what it is like to live oppressed and to not have an opportunity to succeed. The 29-year-old author became the youngest American playwright and only the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. She was also nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play, among the four Tony Awards that the play was nominated for in 1960. Lorraine Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34. Hansberry inspired the song by Nina Simone entitled "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", which was also the title of Hansberry's autobiographical play. Lorraine Hansberry lived a very impactful life and will always be remembered in history.
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