Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 – January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and writer. She was the first Black American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Hansberry's best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. 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 age 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making Hansberry the first Black American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Her family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee.

After moving to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africanist newspaper Freedom, where she worked with other Black intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of Hansberry's work during this time concerned the African struggles for liberation and their impact on the world. She also wrote about being a lesbian and the oppression of gay people. Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at age 34 during the Broadway run of her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window in 1965. Hansberry inspired the Nina Simone song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", whose title-line came from Hansberry's autobiographical play.