Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the youngest child of a Black real estate broker. When she was eight, her family bought a house in a white neighborhood, and hostile neighbors threw a brick through a window that nearly hit her. Her father fought the covenants that kept Black families out, and the case, Hansberry v. Lee, reached the US Supreme Court in 1940.

She studied at the University of Wisconsin, left without a degree and moved to New York in 1950. She wrote for Freedom, a Black newspaper founded by Paul Robeson, and worked for civil rights causes.

A Raisin in the Sun (1959) follows the Youngers, a Black family in a cramped Chicago apartment who must decide what to do with a $10,000 insurance check. It argues that a family's dreams are tied to dignity and to the right to live where they choose. It was the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway, and she became the first Black playwright to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. She died of cancer in 1965, aged 34.