Named in honor of...

Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry was born in 1930, the youngest of four children of Carl and Nannie Hansberry, a respected and successful black family in Chicago, Ill. Nannie was the college educated daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, and Carl was a successful real estate businessman, an inventor and a politician who ran for congress in 1940. Both parents were activist challenging discriminating Jim Crow Laws. Although they could afford good private school, Lorrain was educated in the segregated public schools as her family worked within the system to change the laws governing segregation. After high school Hansberry briefly attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison before moving to New York for "an education of another kind". While in New York, Hansberry worked as an editor for Paul Robeson's radical black newspaper

Freedom until her husband's songwriting success allowed her to devote herself to her play writing. Lorraine Hansberry used the success of A Raisin In the Sun as a platform to speak out against the American Civil Rights Movement and for the African struggle to free itself from white rule. She helped raise money, gave impassioned speeches and took part in panels and interviews to further these causes. After her initial success she lived only six years and was able to complete only one more play, a movie, and a TV script that was too racially controversial to be aired. Her second play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, was received with mixed reviews and kept open for 101 performances only by the contributions and support of the theatre community. It closed the night she died at 34 from cancer. After her death Nemiroff finished and produced her final work, Les Blancs, a play about African Liberation.