[Nyclocal] Hold Fast To Dreams-The Life of Lorraine Hansberry

[SocialistAlliances]

Hold Fast To Dreams- The Life of Lorraine Vivian Hansberry
              
  Dynamic Magazine  Fall 2007, Issue 17
  
  Author: Brandon Slattery
      
  Lorraine Vivian Hansberry, was one of the most relevant and famous  playwrights of the 20th century. Her work was produced in the context  of her struggle for equality and justice in her own life as an  African-American woman in the United States, as well as her  participation in the civil rights movement. What most people don’t  know, and what U.S. history has attempted to erase, is that Lorraine  Hansberry was also a leader of the communist youth movement.
  
  Born in Chicago’s south side in 1930, Hansberry, the youngest of four  children, grew up in a middle-class family. Her parents were prominent  members of the Black community; frequent visitors to her home included  leading African-American cultural and literary figures of the time such  as W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Jesse  Owens, and many others.
  
  When she was eight, her family moved to the suburbs. When they arrived,  they found what Hansberry would later describe as a “hellishly hostile  white neighborhood.” Her father successfully fought the neighborhood’s  covenant, which sought to officially institute discrimination based on  race, all the way to the Supreme Court. The ruling, Hansberry vs. Lee,  became an important victory during the struggle for civil rights.  Meanwhile, Hansberry’s parents sent her to an all-white public school  as a protest against segregation. These childhood experiences would  serve as the inspiration for her most famous work, A Raisin in the Sun.
  
  In 1948, she left home to study art at University of Wisconsin at  Madison, where she soon became involved in a number of progressive  student groups. One of these was the Labor Youth League, which was that  era’s incarnation of the Young Communist League. She eventually became  part of the editorial staff of the LYL’s publication, New Challenge  whose motto was: “The Magazine for Young Americans.”
  
  During this same period, she discovered her calling as a writer,  inspired in part by the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey. She soon became  bored with college, and moved to New York City to pursue “an education  of a different kind,” in the city’s political movements. She did still  pursue formal education, though: She studied at the New School for  Social Research, Roosevelt College, and at the Jefferson School for  Social Sciences (a public school run by communists and independent  socialists), where she took a seminar on Africa taught by W.E.B.  DuBois. This would heighten her awareness about the struggle of African  people against colonization, and the connection of all peoples’  struggles.
  She found a job with Paul Robeson’s Freedom publication, initially as a  secretary, though she quickly moved up to become associate editor.
  
  Around this time she also met Langston Hughes, who would become another  major influence on her work. The title of her play, A Raisin in the  Sun, comes from Hughes’ poem “A Dream Deferred,” where he had asked,  “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it dry up like a raisin in  the sun, / Or does it explode?” Completed in 1957, the play was  celebrated for its insight into everyday black life.
  
  When Hansberry was a college student she had written: “We want to see  film about people who live and work like everybody else, but who  currently must battle fierce oppression to do so.” Though not a film,  at least not then, this is the type of work she created with her drama.  In 1959, A Raisin in the Sun opened in Philadelphia and New Haven,  Connecticut, followed by Hansberry’s hometown Chicago, where the play  is set. It finally moved Broadway, where it was a hit with audiences,  running 530 performances. The cast included Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee,  Ossie Davis, and Louis Gossett.
  
  It was the first play written by an African American woman to be  produced on Broadway, and Hansberry became the first African American,  as well as the youngest person, to produce a work that would win the  New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play of the year. The  movie adaptation, released in 1961, won Hansberry a special award at  the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for a Screen Writers’ Guild  Award for her screenplay. More recently, it was chosen as one of the  100 most significant works of the twentieth century in a National  Theatre poll of playwrights, actors, directors, journalists, and other  theater professionals.
  
  Soon after divorcing her husband of four years, Hansberry joined The  Daughters of Bilitis, the nation’s first lesbian organization. She  contributed to their publication, The Ladder, writing scathing  critiques of sexism and homophobia, pointing out their political roots.  “Homosexual persecution has at its roots not only social ignorance, but  a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma,” she wrote. Because of  aggressive repression of the LGBT community, the publication used only  writers’ initials to protect their identities. Her involvement with the  early lesbian movement has, only recently, been discovered.
  
  Hansberry died of pancreatic cancer at age 34, leaving behind several  unfinished plays. Her ex-husband Robert Nemiroff completed and released  several of them, including Les Blancs and To Be Young, Gifted, and  Black. She also left several more that were never finished, such as an  opera about Eighteenth Century Hatian leader Toussaint L’Overture.  Although Hansberry’s life was tragically short, she left behind a  tremendous legacy as a writer and as an activist. To her, as with her  mentor Paul Robeson, these two endeavors were necessarily linked.
  
  In her life Hansberry had declared that “All art is ultimately social:  that which agitates and that which prepares the mind for slumber,” and  even today her writings succeed in agitating and raising awareness.
  
  
  




http://www.noborderscamp.org/

       
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